ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

TREASURY

The Chancellor of the Exchequer was asked—

Savings

Bob Spink: What his most recent estimate is of the percentage of household disposable income that is saved.

Kitty Ussher: The latest gross household savings ratio is for the fourth quarter of 2008 and it shows that 4.8 per cent. of total household resources were saved.

Bob Spink: Families saving for the future are under serious pressure, especially those with disabled children, as they come under particular pressure when the disabled child reaches 18, so saving is very important for them. What have the Government done to help those families? I ask that because some good Government initiatives that were introduced in the Budget seem to have got lost in the general credit crunch debate.

Kitty Ussher: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising this point, because the Government announced in this year's Budget that we will contribute an additional £100 a year to the child trust fund accounts of all disabled children, with the most severely disabled receiving £200. We are doing that because, as he mentioned, we recognise the particular issues that face disabled children as they reach maturity. They can, of course, control their trust fund assets when they turn 18.

John McFall: There will certainly be a reduction in savings from household income in the Cheltenham and Gloucester area today, following the peremptory announcement by Lloyds of the loss of 1,600 Cheltenham & Gloucester jobs. Is it not the case that Lloyds has betrayed any regard for the dignity of people and their employment, and will the Minister join me in writing to the Cheltenham & Gloucester in order to ensure that people who are to be made unemployed are treated properly?

Kitty Ussher: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this point, and we obviously hope that people will be treated with decency in what is a very difficult time, not only for Lloyds but across the financial services sector. The question of the number of people employed by Lloyds is obviously a commercial matter for the company itself, but I am sure that Members in all parts of the House who have constituents who are affected will want to make sure that they are treated as decently as possible.

Michael Fallon: How can the Treasury properly promote a savings culture when it is led by a Chancellor who last week was scheduled to be sacked? [Hon. Members: "Where is he?"] If the Prime Minister does not have any confidence in the head of the Treasury, why should the rest of us?

Kitty Ussher: Well, I am delighted to be able to report to the House that the Chancellor is currently at ECOFIN fighting for this Government's interests, and in particular ensuring that the UK's interests are represented as the European Community discusses the de Larosière report, which is entirely relevant to the City of London as it deals with the European supervisory framework. I think that that is exactly the right thing for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be doing, and it is in direct contrast to the policies of the Opposition, which are to reduce the influence of our country in Europe by leaving the European People's party and refusing to engage.

James Plaskitt: I welcome my hon. Friend back to the Treasury; it is nice to see her in the team again.
	As my hon. Friend will know, the savings ratio tends to be geared to what is happening to house prices, so it is no surprise that now that we are seeing a house price deflation there is a recovery in household savings. At a time of low inflation, savers will be looking for good deals, and I welcome the extension of the individual savings account scheme in the Budget and particularly the extension of savings opportunities for those over 50. Will she and the Treasury team continue to look at some targeted further developments of the ISA scheme to assist those who are now seeking to save in new ways?

Kitty Ussher: My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to this point. People over 50 will be able to save £10,200 in their ISA from October this year, of which £5,100 can be saved in cash. We know that this will be particularly welcome as savers seek better returns on their assets. It is, of course, a competitive market out there, so I urge anybody who has been adversely affected by the necessary reduction in interest rates to have a look at the comparator tables available on the Financial Services Authority website.

Nicholas Winterton: Can the Minister tell me why anyone should save at this time, bearing in mind that the return they get on any savings is either nil or minimal? Is she not concerned, as I and many other Members on both sides of the House are, about the situation of the elderly, who look to the income from their savings to provide them with a sensible standard of living? What are the Government doing about those who rely to a large extent on their savings to supplement any pension or other modest or low income?

Kitty Ussher: I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was listening, but I just explained one thing that we are doing for the over-50s to ensure that they can get a better return on their savings—we have increased the limits up to which they can save tax-free in ISAs. This Government's policy is to promote saving across the whole of a person's lifetime, which is why we introduced child trust funds—I am delighted that three quarters of parents take those up for their children; we, of course, open them for the remaining quarter. It is also why we introduced and are expanding the ISA allowances, why the savings gateway will come on board from next year and why we continue to give advantageous tax relief to people saving for their pensions.

Bradford & Bingley (Bonds)

Philip Hollobone: What representations United Kingdom Financial Investments has received on the cessation of interest payments on Bradford & Bingley's 11.625 per cent. perpetual subordinated bonds.

Ian Pearson: The Treasury and UKFI receive a wide range of representations on issues relating to banks in receipt of public funds. It is not the Government's practice to provide details of all such representations.

Philip Hollobone: Bradford & Bingley has announced that it is going to default on the interest payments on these bonds. When it made that announcement the capital value of the bonds fell, so many people who have invested in these securities for their retirement income have lost out on both interest and capital. Given that Bradford & Bingley is effectively a Government-owned institution, does this not suggest that the Government are prioritising getting their money back ahead of their moral and legal obligation to bondholders?

Ian Pearson: This was a decision for the Bradford & Bingley board to make, judged against the objectives it had in its business plan. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the statutory debt owed to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme is about £14 billion, and the Treasury is owed about £4 billion. He will also be aware of the normal creditor hierarchy, and I believe that it is fair that the FSCS and the Treasury should be repaid ahead of subordinated liabilities. Furthermore, he will be aware that in such circumstances the 11.625 per cent. rate of interest should have given people who were taking advantage of these bonds some sort of clue that they were making a reasonably risky investment and that they would not necessarily be ahead of others who were making less risky investments.

Mark Lazarowicz: Yesterday, we saw that Lloyds TSB was able to pay back to the taxpayer a net £2.3 billion, and the British Bankers Association today reports that bank lending to small businesses has increased over the past month. Although there is a long way to go, what do those developments tell us about the effectiveness of the Government's strategy towards the banks?

Ian Pearson: My hon. Friend is right to highlight the announcement made yesterday by Lloyds Banking Group. I think that it indicates that the recapitalisation of the banks and the actions that we took in January, on top of those in October, are working. We need to do more to continue to ensure that lending is available in the financial system, be it lending for people who want mortgages or lending to business, which is vital. Well over £50 billion of additional lending has been committed this year, which should make a difference in the future. The Government need to keep taking actions that will make a real difference in helping people and businesses through these difficult economic times, rather than leave people to their own devices, as the Conservative party would do.

Julie Kirkbride: Can the Minister confirm that he is about to appoint a valuer for the assets in Bradford & Bingley and that the valuer will be able to act with complete independence from the views of Ministers in valuing those assets? Can he also confirm that the valuer will be free to offer the same deal to bondholders and shareholders in Bradford & Bingley as the preferential deal offered to the same groups of people in respect of Northern Rock?

Ian Pearson: I can indeed confirm that the Government will appoint a valuer shortly. We hope to be able to do that before the recess, and a public appointments process is going on at the moment. The hon. Lady will be aware of the powers in the Banking Act 2009 and the role of the valuer—they have a remit to act independently. The valuer's decisions will undoubtedly be a matter for the valuer, acting in accordance with his or her remit and existing legislation.

Geoffrey Robinson: I congratulate my hon. Friend on the development at Lloyds. May I ask him to look further at the form of recapitalisation executed there—namely the reduction in high interest rate preference shares for normal equity—to see whether or not he could consider, in the case of Bradford & Bingley and others, using high-yielding bonds too? They could be repaid and therefore make it much easier, in terms of bank liquidity, to promote the very increase in borrowing that we seek.

Ian Pearson: My hon. Friend has a great deal of expertise in these matters, and I always listen with interest to what he says. Lloyds has made a commercial decision about wanting to repay the preference shares, and it is right to refer to the vital importance of liquidity in the financial system. As always, the Government will keep these matters under review.

Graham Brady: Does the Minister accept that it is essential that United Kingdom Financial Investments should be seen to have genuine operational independence? Will the Government therefore take early action to put that body on a proper statutory footing?

Ian Pearson: We have made a number of announcements with regard to UKFI, and as the hon. Gentleman knows, it operates on an arm's length basis. It is right that Bradford & Bingley and other banks that have received Government funds and involve UKFI in a supervisory management role should act on a commercial basis. We will continue to ensure that we provide the right level of resourcing for UKFI so that it can undertake the work that it needs to do, which is about protecting the taxpayer's interests.
	We have to bear in mind the fact that as a Government, we have invested huge sums on behalf of the taxpayer in our banking system. We need to ensure that we do all we can to protect the taxpayer's interests, and that is what we will do.

Inflation

Sally Keeble: What his most recent assessment is of the effect of inflation on the economy.

Liam Byrne: The Treasury's latest assessment of inflation and its effect, and the effect of other factors on the economy, was published in the Budget. Since then, consumer price inflation was 2.3 per cent. in April.

Sally Keeble: I welcome my right hon. Friend to his new post.
	In the longer term, will the Government look again at the inflation target, perhaps with a view to raising it so that as the economy moves out of recession—it is doing that, which is very welcome—the green shoots of recovery are not crushed by too early and too steep an increase in interest rates?

Liam Byrne: We certainly have no plans to choke off growth when it returns, which is exactly why we have put so many tools and resources in place to ensure that we return to recovery as quickly as possible. The reason why we will not revisit the inflation target in future is simple: we do not see that there is a trade-off between inflation and growth, and in the medium term we believe that higher inflation will deliver higher interest rates, which in turn will dampen down our long-term rate of growth. That is exactly why, when the Chancellor published the Budget a month or two ago, he confirmed the Bank's remit to keep the inflation target exactly where it is.

Peter Tapsell: I had intended to congratulate the Chancellor on rising from his grave, but it appears that he is still lurking in the graveyard.
	May I ask when the Treasury plans to reverse the not very successful quantitative easing programme, in order to moderate inflationary expectations?

Liam Byrne: The Governor of the Bank of England has been very clear that quantitative easing is a tool that he needs to ensure that monetary policy operates effectively in this country. That is perhaps why we have not seen the falls in prices that have been seen in other parts of the world. We are absolutely determined to ensure that the Governor has the tools that he needs to set that measure alongside a fiscal stimulus. Together, they amount to something like 4 per cent. of the economy. We believe that that is the best way to return to growth as quickly as possible.

Adam Price: The market is factoring in expectations of a significant rise in inflation, as reflected in higher bond yields. Why is that happening, and does it not run the risk of choking off any economic recovery when it comes?

Liam Byrne: That is exactly why the Chancellor has been clear that the inflation-busting remit of the Governor of the Bank of England remains undisturbed. What is important is that the Chancellor makes available to the Governor the tools that he needs to deliver on that inflation target. That is why it is important that it is down to the independent Monetary Policy Committee to help oversee how tools such as quantitative easing are used.
	The Governor has been clear about how he will approach the question of when to stop using the tools that have been made available to him. He said in the May inflation report that that decision would be based on a judgment about the inflation outlook, so there is no change in the strategy or the approach. This is simply another way of conducting monetary policy within the framework that the Chancellor has set for him.

Greg Hands: May I, too, welcome the Chief Secretary to his new position?
	Last week in Beijing, US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that
	"consumer spending in the United States will be restrained for some time relative to what is typically the case in recoveries. These are necessary adjustments. They will entail a longer, slower process of recovery".
	Going into this recession, UK household debt was even higher than that in the US, so why does the Chief Secretary think that the UK recovery will be so much stronger than that in the US and is he still sticking to his trampoline forecast of 3.5 per cent. growth in 2011?

Liam Byrne: The reason why we have confidence in the forecast is that we not only acted early, but acted to ensure that a considerable stimulus was put in place. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the return to growth after previous recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, he will see that it was not dissimilar to the return to growth that we project in the years to come. But that growth would not materialise and we would not see the recovery that we project if we followed the course of action proposed by the Opposition, and took £5 billion out of the economy at the worst possible time.
	Like me, the hon. Gentleman will have read closely the speech made by the shadow Chancellor, who said this morning:
	"You might think that the middle of a recession is not the time to be investing in the businesses and entrepreneurs of the future, but you couldn't be more wrong. It's actually exactly the right time."
	Can the hon. Gentleman perhaps explain why he plans to take £5 billion out of the economy in the middle of a recession?

Dennis Skinner: Notwithstanding the progress that has been made arising from the G20 and all the rest of it— [ Interruption. ] This is serious— [ Interruption. ] We won every seat in Bolsover last week, six out of six— [ Interruption. ] Not in my area. I was on the streets speaking to voters and getting them out— [ Interruption. ] You are no good at maths, either.
	Will my right hon. Friend bear it in mind that this time last year there was serious speculation in oil and other commodities, and the price of oil rose to $147 a barrel? Speculation undoubtedly played a significant part in that. The price has now risen to $68 today. Will he ensure that there is no speculation of the kind that we had last year, to ensure that the recovery gathers pace through to next year?

Liam Byrne: As my hon. Friend will know, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor, in the Budget, projected that the consumer prices index would begin to fall over the course of this year, which is why it is important that we ensure that the Governor has the right tools at his disposal to ensure that we do not see prices falling uncontrollably and for an extended length of time. We will therefore ensure that the Governor has the tools that he says he needs, but we will need to keep situations such as the rise in oil prices under close review. That is why it is important that we retain a degree of flexibility. It is also why it will be important for us to carry on acting internationally, because the kind of co-ordination that my hon. Friend mentions is best done internationally. That is something that would be very difficult if we were to take the very different approach proposed by the Opposition.

Mr. Speaker: I call Mr. Field. I thought that you wanted to ask a question.

Mark Field: I often want to intervene, although not particularly on this point; the question that I was going to ask concerns something that arose some time ago. What level of quantitative easing does the Chief Secretary believe is consistent with a low inflation target?

Liam Byrne: Well, I am afraid that that is a judgment that we will leave to the Governor of the Bank of England. The Chancellor has authorised up to £150 billion of quantitative easing, and the Bank has drawn down something like £125 billion so far. As I say, it is important that we provide the framework and give the Governor the tools to do the job, but it is also important for the confidence of markets and for delivering the target in hand that it is left to the MPC and the Governor to make the ultimate judgment about how much is needed now and how much is needed later.

Reoffending (Access to Services)

Alun Michael: What discussions he has had with ministerial colleagues to ensure that methods of budgeting for health, education and skills enable quick and effective access to services required to reduce levels of reoffending.

Liam Byrne: The Treasury sits alongside 13 other Departments, including the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health, in our work focused on reducing reoffending. My right hon. Friend will be glad to know that adult reoffending fell by 23 per cent. between 2000 and 2006, while juvenile reoffending fell by nearly 19 per cent. over the same period.

Alun Michael: I welcome my right hon. Friend to answering these questions.
	Does my right hon. Friend agree that spending on aspects such as drug treatment and public health can have an implication for reoffending? For instance, the engagement of young people in school and in having a future through education is also relevant to reducing reoffending. Will he come with me to look at the success of the violence reduction strategy in Cardiff, which has prevented violent crime and also reduced the need for expensive surgery? Will he also ensure that officials in his Department make the connection between these different sorts of budgets?

Liam Byrne: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the persistence and tenacity with which he has raised this issue with Treasury Ministers. I would be pleased to learn a little more about the work in Cardiff that he has talked about. It is a clear example of the way in which front-line public servants, when they are given greater freedom, can work together more effectively to deliver better outcomes on such an important agenda, very often for less money. I know that he will be keen to know more about the work of Sir Michael Bichard, who is working in 13 different areas around the country to consider how, within different local authority areas, we can bring together the work of public services engaged in similar endeavours.

Gary Streeter: Is this not an area where the Minister can bring to bear experience from his previous office? Is it not something that Governments of all colours are rather bad at—namely, spending on prevention rather than cure and spending upstream to avoid a problem rather than spending money on the consequences of that problem? Could not the excellent third sector organisations be deployed far more efficiently by the Government, with the right kind of backing, to stop people reoffending as frequently as they do?

Liam Byrne: I have to agree with the hon. Gentleman. Moving our attention and our resources into the business of prevention will, overall, be much cheaper for the country and will save a lot of human pain in the medium and long term. I must agree with him that the third sector provides extraordinary new potential, as do charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises. They can help on this agenda in two fields in particular. First, they can ensure that those who are convicted of offences are given much greater skills, education and literacy training so that they are better able to succeed in the labour market. Secondly, they can do a better job of helping people to kick the poison of drugs. As we know, that is the root cause of so much reoffending in this country.

Andy Reed: One of the most effective approaches with young offenders in particular is finding paid employment. I have seen a scheme sponsored by National Grid that reduces the reoffending rates from 70 per cent. to just 7 per cent. through supported employment, taking young people into the workplace and ensuring that they have all the support they need. As has been said, this is all about prevention and ensuring that we invest in the long term by investing these moneys up front. Will he commit to ensuring that such schemes are replicated across the country so that we learn from the best practice that is already happening up and down our Prison Service?

Liam Byrne: The scheme that my hon. Friend mentions is very much the kind of scheme that will be more possible in the future because of the £100 million of investment provided last year in the youth crime action plan. As I say, ensuring that money and resources go into equipping people with the skills that they need to succeed in today's labour market is one of the best investments that we can make in crime prevention. From my experience in my constituency, I think that that must go alongside well-organised, well-structured and well-delivered programmes to keep people away from drugs, too, but where there is innovation such as that pioneered by National Grid, we will, of course, seek to learn from it and build on it.

Debt Reduction

Richard Ottaway: What recent discussions officials in his Department have had with the International Monetary Fund on the Government's plans for debt reduction.

Liam Byrne: The IMF holds bilateral discussions with each of its member countries, usually every year, as part of its country surveillance function. IMF staff last visited London in May 2009 and met representatives of various institutions, including Her Majesty's Treasury.

Richard Ottaway: The IMF recently published its report on the British economy and the Minister's colleagues have clearly read it, as they are very fond of quoting the odd phrase that supports the Government's tattered economic policy. However, at its heart it is highly critical and calls for a
	"more ambitious medium-term fiscal adjustment path".
	Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that that is bureaucratic code for, "We're in a mess and the Budget doesn't sort it out"?

Liam Byrne: I am afraid that I am going to be guilty of quoting from aspects of the IMF report again, but like me the hon. Gentleman will have read the IMF's endorsement of the Government's response to the crisis. It said that it was "bold and wide ranging" and would "support the recovery"—an echo of what IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said when he told "Newsnight" that it was "obvious" that the fiscal stimulus
	"is the right thing to do".
	However, there will be differences of view with the IMF. For example, we have a different projection or estimate of what the return to growth will look like; the IMF estimates that economic growth will contract by 4.1 per cent. this year, but the consensus among independent forecasters is for something more akin to 3.8 per cent. It is not unexpected, therefore, that we will have different ideas and judgments about what is the right pathway back to fiscal balance. We are determined to make sure that we halve the deficit over four years and pay off something of the order of £50 billion by 2013-14. Where there are difficult decisions to make, we will make them, especially on tax and efficiency. Unlike the Opposition, however, we are determined to make sure that we protect front-line services because we think that that is the best way to protect businesses and families in this country while returning as quickly as possible to a sensible and sustainable fiscal position.

Gisela Stuart: The economies of some European economies, such as Hungary and Latvia, are experiencing deep economic troubles, and traditionally they would turn to the IMF for help and rescue. They are also committed to becoming members of the eurozone, so is the Treasury having any discussions with the IMF on how to co-ordinate the actions of the IMF and the European Commission in respect of those failing currencies?

Liam Byrne: As my hon. Friend knows, conversations about such questions go on all the time with the IMF and within the European Commission. She underlines the point that we need a better system of international surveillance so that preventive action, where it is needed, can be taken fast.

David Heathcoat-Amory: Will the Chief Secretary confirm that this country is now formally in an excessive deficit procedure, and that the Economic and Finance Council wrote to the Chancellor on 27 April to say that the Government had not taken effective action to correct the situation? ECOFIN also said that, even on the Government's own figures, our deficit will be more than four times the permitted 3 per cent. level. Is the Minister pleased or sad that that rules out this country joining the euro in the foreseeable future?

Liam Byrne: I missed the last bit, but the answer to the substance of the question is that we have to make sure that we publish a pathway back to balance that is open, transparent and credible. It will entail the difficult policy choices that were set out very clearly in the Budget. Difficult decisions will have to be taken, such as increasing marginal rates of tax on the 600,000 people who earn more than £150,000 a year. Serious efficiency measures will also be needed, but as my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary said recently, that is precisely the sort of discipline that we are determined to set out, and stick to.

Tom Clarke: Since debt reduction is of the utmost importance to developing countries, will my right hon. Friend confirm that the Government remain absolutely committed to achieving the millennium development goals?

Liam Byrne: Yes, I am happy to provide my right hon. Friend and the House with that assurance.

Richard Spring: Given the way our debts are growing, is the right hon. Gentleman aware that according to  The Economist, our Budget deficit this year as a percentage of GDP will be the highest in the entire industrialised world?

Liam Byrne: The very reason we are able to mount the fiscal stimulus that we put in place this year is that, against international comparisons, we went into the downturn with relatively low levels of debt. We think it is important that we invest now, because if we did not provide the stimulus that we are putting in place, the recession would cut deeper and longer, and would more closely resemble the kind of experience that this country went through in the 1980s and 1990s. That is not an experience, thanks very much, that we want to repeat.

Stephen Ladyman: I do not know where  The Economist got its figures, but the IMF figures indicate that debt in this country as a percentage of GDP is lower than in all our industrial competitors and will stay lower than theirs for several years. Is not the key thing about debt whether or not we can service it? As we reduce those levels of debt, may I ask my right hon. Friend not to cut the investments that we are making in jobs, wealth creation and public services, because those are what will guarantee that we can repay the debt in the long term?

Liam Byrne: I can provide that assurance because in the Budget the Chancellor was able to set out a pathway back to balance, which involved difficult decisions on tax, spending and efficiencies, not least adding to the £30 billion of efficiencies projected for next year a further £5 billion. The Chancellor was also able to set out the kind of sustained investment that we can continue this year, for example, in primary care trusts, with budgets up 5.5 per cent., in schools, with budgets up this year 4.3 per cent., in front-line policing, with budgets up this year 2.7 per cent., and in local councils, which this year helped to deliver the lowest council tax increases for more than a decade.

David Gauke: May I welcome the Chief Secretary to his new position? I am sure his arrival in his new post will be welcomed by the Chancellor as well, not least on the grounds that, presumably, the Chief Secretary's spouse will not be plotting to replace the Chancellor. The IMF report that we have been discussing says that the UK recovery will be subdued and gradual, in contrast to the Treasury's very optimistic forecasts, yet is was reported in  The Times last week that even the Treasury's projections were insufficient for the Prime Minister, and
	"the Prime Minister tried to upgrade the growth forecasts to make the economic outlook appear rosier than it was; the Chancellor refused."
	Is there any truth in this allegation? Is this not another example of splits between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor?

Liam Byrne: What are important for the House are the estimates that were published. There is indeed a range of views right the way across independent forecasters. The hon. Gentleman will no doubt have access to those, as I do. The IMF, it is true, is on the pessimistic end of those forecasts, projecting a 4.1 per cent. contraction this year. I understand that the IMF has now revised its forecast three times since October last year, reflecting a degree of uncertainty in the international economy, but I merely note for the House that the IMF is at the pessimistic end of that range of forecasts. If one corrals the range of independent forecasts that are available, one finds the consensus among them is about 3.8 per cent. We think growth will be stronger than that but, as the Chancellor has said to the House a number of times, the international economy remains in an uncertain place.

Early Intervention

Graham Allen: If he will take steps to ensure that policy to encourage early intervention is taken into account in decisions on expenditure in the next comprehensive spending review; and if he will make a statement.

Stephen Timms: I pay tribute to my hon. Friend's work on early intervention. Its benefits have been recognised in spending decisions and, for example, in January's "New Opportunities" White Paper, as my hon. Friend knows, and they will certainly be recognised, as he calls for, in future spending decisions as well.

Graham Allen: Will my right hon. Friend have a word with the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury and congratulate him on now being a little closer to the place where he can actually do something about social inclusion and early intervention? Will he also discuss with him the idea that the best way to pay off debt is to invest effectively and early, securing returns through people who have grown up to be more capable citizens due to early intervention? Will he therefore include early intervention, as the next theme of the comprehensive spending review, in every single Department so that we can start to receive repayments from that investment, to pay off the debt and to establish an effective economic base among our people as well as among our financial institutions?

Stephen Timms: My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the benefits of investing particularly in the early years of children's lives. Sure Start children's centres are a great example: we have invested almost £2 billion in them, and we will have 3,500 of them by the end of next year. It is absolutely right to say that that investment in children's earliest years will amply be repaid in years to come. Future spending will not be needed because children will be better equipped for their future lives—transforming their chances. I can tell my hon. Friend that we certainly will reflect that perspective in the comprehensive spending review, when that work is under way. It would be catastrophic to impose £5 billion of unplanned spending cuts this year, as the Opposition have argued for.

Anne McIntosh: Early intervention is welcome, but how does the Minister expect to cope with the lack of social and language skills of many pupils entering reception classes and the first years of primary school, which reflect the breakdown generally in British society?

Stephen Timms: Of course, the hon. Lady's point is one reason why early intervention is so important. The network of 3,500 children's centres will make a big contribution to preparing children at the start of their lives to do well, and for school when they reach it. It is vital that those investments be maintained. One great benefit of the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on that issue is the cross-party support for it. He wrote a pamphlet jointly with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), and we need to sustain that commitment.

Andrew Love: One issue that must be considered, along with early intervention, is poverty among families. The Government have a commitment to child poverty reduction targets, but unfortunately it has not been possible to implement them in recent years. We must stick with those targets, however, so will my right hon. Friend commit to keeping them as a priority and ensure that they are part of the comprehensive spending review next year?

Stephen Timms: I certainly will. We have made a great deal of progress in reducing child poverty. The number of children below the poverty line has been reduced by half a million since 1997; our commitment is to secure the eradication of child poverty in the UK by 2020, and we will shortly publish legislation to enshrine that commitment in statute.

Philip Hammond: I realise why it was impossible up until last week for the Chancellor to confirm the details of the comprehensive spending review, but, since the Chancellor has now reasserted control of his Department, will the right hon. Gentleman, on the Chancellor's behalf, confirm that there will indeed be a comprehensive spending review? Will he also confirm the timing of that review and the period that it will cover?

Stephen Timms: An announcement of the timing of the comprehensive spending review has not yet been made, and I am not able to provide additional information on that, but of course there will certainly be one.

Jim Cunningham: In the spending review, will the Government take into account the impact of oil prices, particularly on businesses and communities, which have great difficulties with them?

Stephen Timms: Yes, we certainly will. We have put in place an effective programme of support for businesses, which need help to get through this very difficult period in the world economy. We are starting to see clear signs that the steps we have taken are working, and we will maintain our support for businesses in the period ahead.

Public Sector Debt

Andrew Selous: By what date he next expects public sector debt to fall below 40 per cent. of gross domestic product.

Brooks Newmark: By what date he next expects public sector debt to fall below 40 per cent. of gross domestic product.

Liam Byrne: In the current global environment of uncertainty, our focus is on ensuring that debt is on a downward turn in the medium term, and we have set out clear plans to do precisely that.

Andrew Selous: Does the Minister accept that the huge increase in Government debt in the UK represents significant extra tax rises for the British people in the future, and that the interest on that debt also represents massive amounts of public spending forgone in future years?

Liam Byrne: We have been very clear about what precisely we project and anticipate in the years to come. We have been candid and open about the tax and spending implications, and the efficiency implications. I know the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I tell him that the future costs of today's downturn would be far more significant if we let it cut deeper and longer, and taking £5 billion out of public spending right now would guarantee exactly that.

Brooks Newmark: I am sure the Minister is aware that on-balance-sheet debt is likely to rise to 79 per cent. of gross domestic product by 2013-14. I am sure he is well aware that, the Government having acquired several banks, that debt amounts to roughly £2 trillion, currently held off-balance sheet, in addition to another £1 trillion of public sector pension liabilities. Can he confirm how much debt is currently held off-balance sheet by the Government, and what percentage of GDP that represents?

Liam Byrne: We can be open about what the costs are of the current financial crisis, and those costs were set out clearly in the Budget. Both the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England have welcomed the degree of transparency about the kind of costs we have projected.

Rob Marris: When calculating public sector debt, can my right hon. Friend assure me that the whole cost of private finance initiative schemes will be included? He talks of transparency; we need transparency in relation to PFI, which is at best a murky scheme, and at worst a failed scheme.

Liam Byrne: I know that I will not be the first Minister to answer that question by reminding the House that that is of course a matter for the Office for National Statistics.

Clive Efford: Will my right hon. Friend reflect on what the alternatives might have been if we had not intervened in the banking system? My constituents—pensioners with savings, and people with mortgages and businesses—are relieved that the Government have taken the action that they have taken. Complaints from Conservative Members about the level of debt that that has given rise to demonstrate that they would have done absolutely nothing to assist those people, or to deal with the dire consequences that people would have faced as a result.

Liam Byrne: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I would tempt him to go further. Of course, if the rescue for the banks had not taken place, not only would the economy be in a far more serious situation now, but its potential for growth would be in a far more serious position. That, in part, is precisely why the IMF has congratulated the Government on the bold and wide-ranging programme we have put in place, and indeed on the international leadership we have shown.

Topical Questions

Sally Keeble: If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

Liam Byrne: We will bring forward a statement of departmental responsibilities to the House at the earliest possible opportunity.

Sally Keeble: Perhaps like many other hon. Members in this House, I have a branch of Cheltenham & Gloucester in my town. May I put it to my right hon. Friend that many people will be really concerned about the loss of jobs and services from institutions that have had so much public sector funding? Will he therefore ensure that the banks understand that although of course we expect them to make a profit and repay their debts, we also expect them to honour their wider social commitments to their employees, their customers and the wider community?

Ian Pearson: I fully understand the comments that my hon. Friend makes. She will be aware that Lloyds Banking Group is undertaking a restructuring exercise. To be frank, in some instances it does not make sense to have three branches of the same bank within 100 yd of each other. That having been said, it is vital that Lloyds Banking Group follows the right sort of processes, and that it treats not only its customers but its staff fairly. Although we are talking about an operational decision for Lloyds, Lloyds has made it clear that it intends, as a matter of preference, to try to carry out its proposals through natural turnover of its staff, and we hope that it will be possible to do that.

Mr. Speaker: Order. In case there is a problem, I should say that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury opened by saying what great things his Department was doing. It would appear, however, that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury knew more about this particular subject.

George Osborne: I know he got off to a shaky start, but let me welcome the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury to his job. He is the fifth Chief Secretary I have faced—and hopefully the last before the general election. I hope he enjoys his move from No. 10 to the Treasury, and that the coffee is up to his exacting standards. At least he knows he will not be hit on the head by a flying mobile phone.
	Will the Chief Secretary confirm that the Treasury's current spending plans—the plans set out by the Treasury at the Budget—show that total real Government spending is going to be cut in the years 2011, 2012 and 2013? If that is the case, what on earth was the Prime Minister saying when he told the press conference last Friday:
	"Public spending is due to rise every year"?

Liam Byrne: I thank the shadow Chancellor for that welcome, delivered with the self-assurance and charm that have become his trademark in the House. As he very well knows, when the Chancellor set out his Budget he provided for 0.7 per cent. real-terms increases in current spending. That is set alongside a move in public service net investment to 1.25 per cent. That was the position the Prime Minister was echoing last week.

George Osborne: I am sorry, but I must press the Chief Secretary on this. He gave us the current spending figures; I am asking about total Government spending, which is what the Prime Minister was asked about. The Treasury figures clearly show that that is going to be cut in 2011, 2012 and 2013. That is why the Chancellor of the Exchequer said on the radio, the day after the Budget, that he had cut overall spending. What on earth did the Prime Minister mean when he said that public spending was due to rise every year?

Liam Byrne: The position is as I have just stated. There will be real growth in public spending of 0.7 per cent. between 2011-12 and 2013-14, alongside a situation in which public sector net investment moves to a position of 1.25 per cent. by 2013-14.  [Interruption.] I hear Opposition Members squealing "Cut" from a sedentary position. However, through our process of bringing forward capital investment into this year, we are indeed able to provide for reductions in capital spending in later years. What the Prime Minister was reflecting is very clearly the position in current spending as was set out by the Chancellor at the Budget.

John Mann: The prevailing economic philosophy is that the free movement of labour across Europe is good for the economy. Does the Chief Secretary agree with me that his Department needs to provide statistics to demonstrate whether a worker permanently resident in this country who gets a job has a greater economic multiplier effect than a temporarily resident migrant worker who gets the same job?

Liam Byrne: That subject has been debated extensively in both Houses and it was reviewed in some depth by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. In their evidence submitted to that Committee, the Government were clear that, on average, migrant workers contribute more to this country than they take out. Obviously, it is important to keep that under close review. The advent of the Australian points-based system means that we are able either to raise or lower the bar to newcomers much more flexibly, depending on the needs of the labour market here and the overall economic contribution made to this country by migration.

Jeremy Browne: My hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) apologises for being unavoidably absent owing to a recent operation on his appendix. As the Chief Secretary surveys the team in his new Department, can he think of any part of the Treasury ministerial anatomy that, similarly, serves no useful function, exists in a state of constant pain and was threatened with brutal surgical removal over the weekend?

Liam Byrne: None springs immediately to mind.

David Clelland: Ministers will be aware that this week is carers week. Could the appropriate Minister from the Treasury meet the appropriate Minister from the Department for Work and Pensions to try to find the finances to end the unfairness in the carer's allowance, which is completely lost following a very small increase in earnings or on retirement, despite the fact that the caring role and responsibility continue?

Kitty Ussher: This being my first day as a Treasury Minister, having previously been at the Department for Work and Pensions, I can say I will be delighted to hold such a meeting.

Tom Brake: What progress has the Chadwick review made on compensation for Equitable Life policyholders?

Ian Pearson: As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, the Government appointed Sir John Chadwick to advise us on the form of an ex gratia payment scheme that should be devised and the factors that relate to disproportionate impact. I can report that Sir John Chadwick has made progress; when I recently appeared before the Public Administration Committee, I gave further details about how his work was proceeding. I can confirm that actuarial advisers have been appointed to help him with his work, and that he has the staffing and resources he requires to do his job. We have always said that we wanted progress to be made as quickly as possible, and that clearly remains the Government's position.

Andrew MacKinlay: Last week, the Northern Ireland Secretary gave the House an undertaking that he would pursue with vigour the crisis facing investors in the Presbyterian Mutual Society in Northern Ireland. There is clearly a Treasury dimension to this. I would like to know what has been done, what is being done, and what discussions are being held on behalf of those investors—the most thrifty and decent people who are very anxious about having access to their funds now.

Ian Pearson: I sympathise with the situation that people who have made investments in the Presbyterian Mutual Society are facing. My hon. Friend will be aware that the PMS is not like a normal savings institution: it is not regulated by the Financial Services Authority, and when people made investments they did so in the form of shares rather than deposits. Different circumstances therefore apply. He will be aware that there has been an investigation. We have been looking into the whole issue of the regulation of credit unions and industrial and provident societies, and a report is due to be published shortly.

Andrew George: In respect of the Government's planned changes to furnished holiday lettings tax rules, could the Financial Secretary to the Treasury clarify whether it would be possible to distinguish between properties that are purpose-built chalets, caravans, and other properties with occupancy restrictions that are clearly intended for the holiday lettings industry, and other properties that have been lived in and could be lived in again by local families in need?

Stephen Timms: I would not want to encourage the hon. Gentleman in the view that that might give a way forward on this issue. Our position is that we have given support in the past. It is clear, under European Union rules, that that support would need to be extended to furnished accommodation not only in the UK but across Europe. We are therefore making that change, but only for a year; then our intention would be to withdraw the relief altogether, not just for some but for all furnished holiday accommodation.

David Taylor: Further to earlier answers, Britain's national debt would be repaid more rapidly, and public expenditure cuts would be avoided more easily, if the top 700 British companies did not involve themselves in tax avoidance on such a grand scale. Why, in that case, does this year's Finance Bill repeal section 765 of the Income and Corporation Taxes Act 1988, which requires companies to seek the permission of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs before moving cash offshore and to say whether the move will be to the detriment of the Treasury? That will encourage avoidance.

Stephen Timms: I do not think it will. Indeed, we are likely to debate the matter in the Finance Committee this afternoon. The Treasury consents rules were introduced in 1951 in a very different environment and they are now clearly out of date. The measures that I will set out in Committee this afternoon, with which we are replacing those rules, are a much more effective way of tackling the genuine problem of avoidance, to which my hon. Friend rightly draws attention.

Mark Harper: The announcement today by Lloyds TSB about the job losses at Cheltenham & Gloucester is a big blow, particularly to the 74 people who will be made redundant in Gloucester. The bigger issue is the 1,000 people who also work in our county for the Cheltenham & Gloucester mortgage business. Given that the Government control a significant stake through UKFI—which the second permanent secretary to the Treasury runs, and which is therefore not at arm's length—can the Minister provide any assurance about whether those jobs are secure in the short and the long term?

Ian Pearson: As I have told the House previously, if we are to protect taxpayers' interests, it is vital that UKFI manages its relationships with the banks in which the Government have investments commercially. Lloyds Banking Group is making commercial decisions. As with any major company, we expect it to act in a socially responsible manner and undertake due processes of consultation with its work force. My understanding is that that is exactly what is happening.

John Barrett: Despite the massive investment of public funds in the banking sector, many small and medium-sized viable companies have contacted me to say that the banks are not providing the financial support that they require. What are the Chancellor and the Treasury team doing to ensure that money that goes to the banks finds its way to small and medium-sized businesses?

Ian Pearson: Let us first be clear that, when the Government took action to prevent the collapse in the banking system, we were investing not in the banks but in people who had savings and mortgages and in companies that had overdrafts in the banking system to ensure that it could continue. As a result of the negotiations in January, under the asset protection scheme, RBS has made legally binding commitments to invest more in businesses this year and next, as has Lloyds. The sums for businesses are £16 billion from RBS and £14 billion from Lloyds, on top of the additional investments that Northern Rock is making and the announcements from banks that have not taken advantage of the recapitalisation scheme, such as HSBC and Barclays.
	We are in a position whereby much of the international finance that was available to the UK economy in the form of lending to business has disappeared in the past 12 months. We are putting that back in place through our negotiations and agreements with UK banks. We will continue to monitor, through the lending panel, actual lending in the UK economy, so that we can ensure that small and medium-sized enterprises and other businesses get the lending and financial support that they need to see them through the difficult times.

Andrew Love: I wonder whether my hon. Friend saw the survey in the  Financial Times yesterday of City economists. It showed that a majority thought the recession would end in June. The minority who did not thought it would end sooner rather than later this year. Does that not show that the City is coming round to the Budget forecasts for the economy? Is that not a clear endorsement of the Government's programme for a fiscal stimulus?

Liam Byrne: My hon. Friend will be delighted to hear that I have no plans to provide a running commentary on growth forecasts. The Budget clearly set out our current expectations, and the next update will be provided to the House in the pre-Budget report. I merely note that several City economists and independent forecasters have revised up their forecasts for growth next year and adjusted their forecasts for the extent of the downturn this year. As I said in response to earlier questions, independent forecasters' average for contraction this year is 3.8 per cent., which is much closer to the forecast that we published in the Budget.

Andrew Selous: May I ask Treasury Ministers to look again at the position of those families who are being pursued by the Treasury for alleged overpayment of tax credits? I still have a steady stream of families coming to my surgery who are being chased, sometimes for up to £10,000 or more. They come in with detailed files of information, and I am absolutely inclined to believe that they have been entirely honourable and honest in looking at their claims. Those families tell me that the Treasury sometimes takes the more expensive period of their child care, rather than looking at their child care costs over the period as a whole. Those families do not like the way the Treasury acts as judge and jury, with no right of appeal. That causes huge distress, so may I ask Ministers please to look again at the issue and tell us that they can do something to help those families?

Stephen Timms: We have already made some substantial changes and improvements to the way the tax credit system works. One of the consequences is, for example, that complaints to the tax credit office are down by a half, compared with two years ago, so there have certainly been considerable improvements. The tax credits transformation programme that we have put in place is delivering. I accept that there is more to be done, but it is worth remembering that 6 million families benefit from tax credits, and that includes 10 million children. That is one of the main reasons why we have been able to reduce child poverty so substantially over the past 10 years, but we need to ensure that the system works as efficiently as possible and that overpayments are minimised. We have seen a big reduction in the number of overpayments, and we will work to improve the position further.

David Burrowes: May I give the new Chief Secretary another opportunity, while the cat is away, to play at being open about the Government's spending plans? Given the analysis of spending plans by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Departments are projected to face a real-terms cut of 2.3 per cent., which translates into cuts totalling £20 billion. Can he come clean today and accept that the 2009 Budget heralded significant Labour cuts?

Liam Byrne: Let me be very clear—I am afraid I will have to repeat a number of the points that I made earlier. The Chancellor set out clearly what changes will happen overall to public sector net investment over the next few years and what changes we forecast to real growth in current spending. However, as he said as recently as last oral questions, with the degree of uncertainty in the international economy that we currently face, I just do not think that now is the time to start making detailed budgets for individual Departments for the year after the Olympics.

Point of Order

Peter Luff: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is any procedure available to the House—to Ministers or Back Benchers—to extend the time available on Thursday for topical questions to the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills? The publication of ministerial responsibilities today reveals the true extent of the massive changes being planned, with responsibilities moving to and from the new Department. I have just come from another place, where I saw a private notice question to the Secretary of State and First Secretary of State, the noble Lord Mandelson, who singularly failed to convince the House of the merits of the change. The bewildering range of questions on Thursday's Order Paper shows the scale of what is happening to the Department. For once, the topical question, "If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities", is the one question to which this House needs an answer, but sadly 15 minutes will not be enough to deliver it. Is there any guidance that you can give me, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Speaker: That is not a matter for the Chair, but the House will have noticed that from time to time I tend to run topical questions beyond 3.30 pm, because they are very popular. No doubt those on the Front Bench will have heard what the hon. Gentleman has had to say, and I thank him.

Road Signs (Tourist Destinations and Facilities)

Motion for leave to introduce a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)

Alan Beith: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to impose duties on the Highways Agency and other public authorities to promote tourism by providing or permitting to be provided appropriate road signage; and for connected purposes.
	The Bill is the product of the frustration of people whose businesses depend on tourism at the obstruction that they meet in getting approval for signs to direct motorists to their location in rural areas. They are frustrated particularly with the attitude of the Highways Agency and the planning authorities, which in turn are influenced by guidance from central Government; their frustration is shared by hon. Members. I am grateful to those who so readily agreed to be supporters of the Bill, including my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson), who is here this afternoon and who I know is seeking to deal with the same problem in his constituency.
	Tourism is absolutely vital to most rural communities, and many tourist businesses depend on motorists finding their way off the main road to the wide variety of leisure, educational, catering, retail and accommodation facilities on offer. Many of those facilities depend on passing trade; others might already be known about but are difficult to find without a sign indicating where to turn off the main road.
	I am not in favour of American-style billboards all over our roads and fields, advertising products that are not local, and a rush of such signs along some motorways might have prompted a tougher line being taken. That was understandable, but there is a completely different case to be made for local tourism signs. Signs for local amenities need to be attractively designed, well sited and not confusing or too numerous. It is right that there should be planning controls, so long as they are exercised proportionately and sympathetically. In too many instances, however, we find obstruction and disproportionate action.
	In looking at examples of the problem, I want to distinguish between two types of sign: brown signs and privately provided signs. On trunk roads, the Highways Agency has a system for the familiar brown signs, although it is at best a fairly rigid scheme. High visitor numbers are required to qualify for a sign, for which the tourist attraction pays. On motorways, an attraction needs 250,000 visitors a year to qualify for a sign; on single carriageway roads such as the A1 in Northumberland, the figure goes down to 40,000, with the possibility of an allowance for seasonal businesses. Many tourist attractions try to get through all the hoops and meet the definitions to qualify and pay for a sign, but are still refused.
	I wonder how many can match the experience of Berwick-upon-Tweed golf club at Goswick, south of Berwick. It is a beautiful seaside links course that attracts thousands of visiting golfers and will stage the pre-qualifying competition for the British Open every year for the next three years. It is the first course in the north-east to get that honour. In 2000, it paid £1,200 for brown signs. Recently, however, the Highways Agency removed the signs, without consulting the club or allowing it to make representations.
	I took the matter up with the Highways Agency, which has apologised for its failure to consult. So that is all right: the signs will go back up, won't they? Oh, no. They cannot go back up, because the Highways Agency says that they are no longer in line with its current policy on tourist signs. It says that the golf club should advise visitors through its website to look out for the road sign to Goswick and follow that route. That involves taking a dangerous turning off a single carriageway road, one of several turnings to places with confusingly similar names: Goswick, Cheswick and Fenwick. The idea that hundreds of visiting golfers should have to rely on their computer back home to spot the right turning is ridiculous. If the Highways Agency wants to prove my Bill unnecessary, it must abandon this ridiculous refusal to reinstate very necessary signs, and show more flexibility and helpfulness to rural businesses.
	Another case involves a newly built country hotel at Doxford Hall, north of Alnwick, which simply needs to be added to an existing brown sign on the Al that refers to other local amenities at Doxford. Hon. Members might have seen a reference to this place, because the owner is planning to sell it and to give the entire proceeds to cancer nursing in the community in north Northumberland—a marvellous gesture. On roads other than trunk roads, local highway authorities are responsible for the signs, and some are helpful. I gather that Northumberland county council has agreed to brown signage for Doxford Hall on the local roads, for example.
	Brown signs are clearly going to be approved for and financed by only the larger tourist businesses. Small country pubs, tea rooms, animal sanctuaries, potteries, bed and breakfasts, farm shops and other smaller-scale amenities usually try to have a smaller sign on the edge of a field or on a fence alongside the road. Some of those signs are needed only during the tourist season. They require planning permission, for which there are fees to be paid, whether the application is successful or not. A couple of years ago, the Department for Communities and Local Government, through central guidance, set off a purge of roadside signs, which hit rural businesses in many parts of the country. Council officials were dispatched to remove signs. One over-zealous official in my constituency actually started painting over offending signs with a spray can.
	I believe that there is a need for a more tolerant attitude, and for a simple approval process to ensure that signs provide direction to nearby tourist facilities and that they are safely sited, from a road safety point of view, proportionate and adequately designed. The absence of such a light-touch system has led to a proliferation of parked vans, farm trailers and other less attractive substitutes for proper signs—although they, too, are now covered by the planning guidance and are at risk of removal.
	In a period of recession, the countryside depends more than ever on visiting tourists contributing to the rural economy. People need to be able to see where the facilities are, and it is better for road safety that the motorist can clearly see where to turn off and find a meal, a bed, a place of interest or a facility for the children. My Bill simply places obligations on the Highways Agency, highway authorities and planning authorities to help the promotion of local tourist facilities by providing appropriate road signs or permitting appropriate signs to be provided. At the moment, small businesses too often feel that the system is working against them when it should be helping them, enabling them to make their services available to the motorist and thereby to support tourism in the economy of the countryside.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Ordered,
	That Sir Alan Beith, Hilary Armstrong, Mr. Nigel Evans, Mr. Adrian Sanders, Mr. David Drew, Mr. Denis Murphy and Dan Rogerson present the Bill.
	Sir Alan Beith accordingly presented the Bill.
	 Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 26 June and to be printed (Bill 107).

Opposition Day
	 — 
	[12th Allotted Day]

Knife Crime

Mr. Speaker: I advise the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Chris Grayling: I beg to move,
	That this House believes that teenage knife crime and the increased incidence of carrying knives in many communities is one of the most critical social and law and order issues facing the country; welcomes the contribution made by the Home Affairs Select Committee in its Seventh Report, Session 2008-09, on Knife Crime, published 5 on 2 June 2009; commends the work done by voluntary sector organisations like the Damilola Taylor Trust to tackle the problem; and expresses the belief that the solution to knife crime will only come from cross-community co-operation to address its root causes.
	Before I begin my remarks on the motion, I welcome the new Home Secretary and his new team to their positions. It is five years since I last did battle with the right hon. Gentleman over top-up fees, and it is a pleasure to shadow him again. I wondered whether he might prove to be the shortest-lived Home Secretary in the history of this country, but following last night's meeting of the parliamentary Labour party it appears that he might have to wait a little longer before he gets the opportunity to move into No. 10. Seriously, however, I look forward to debating the issues facing us all over the months ahead.
	No doubt we will argue intensively over the failures of Government policy, but today's debate is intended to be different. I understand from the Clerks that it is customary for an Opposition day motion to be critical of the Government and their policies, but this motion is not intended to do that. Rather, it is intended to stimulate a serious discussion about an issue that has been of concern to all of us—knife crime, particularly among our young people. It is an issue that is both serious and disturbing and one that should be subject to dialogue across the political and community divides.
	Last week, the Home Affairs Select Committee published a thoughtful report on the subject, and during the course of its inquiry it invited representations from across the House. The Committee took evidence from me and the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, as well as from Ministers, so it seemed logical and sensible for the House to have an early opportunity to discuss the matter. I very much hope that the Chairman of the Select Committee will be able to catch your eye, Mr. Speaker, and give us his perspectives on the inquiry.
	It is also sensible to give the House the opportunity to praise and discuss the views of organisations out in the community that deal with knife crime and its consequences. Our voluntary sector does hugely valuable work in trying to break down the knife culture and the tendency of young people to become caught up in gangs. We should recognise the importance of what they do.

Keith Vaz: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his warm words about the Select Committee report and for the tone of the motion. In giving evidence to the Select Committee, he went out of his way to stress the importance of cross-party approaches, which also includes the voluntary sector. Does he agree that only by parties working together and raising the issue above party politics will we truly find a solution to knife crime?

Chris Grayling: That is right. There will be times when we debate issues on a party basis, but not because we have different objectives. We all share the objective of reducing crime and knife crime and of restoring stability to communities affected by it. There may be times when we disagree over methods or are critical of Ministers because we think they have got it wrong. That is right and proper, but organisations and individuals out there are looking to this House for a grown-up and mature debate. It is right and proper that with an issue as serious as this one we take a step back from time to time and have a grown-up discussion of the kind that the right hon. Gentleman rightly started in his Home Affairs Committee.
	Before I get to the heart of the debate, I want to make one important point. There is no arms race going on among all children in the United Kingdom, nor are all seven-year-olds carrying knives for their elders. There is an acute gang problem in some parts of the country, particularly in inner-city areas and most significantly in parts of London, but the vast majority of young people are decent, law-abiding citizens, getting on with their lives, taking their exams, working on a Saturday morning and having fun on a Saturday night. We must not allow a serious and important debate to create the sense that young people are a problem today.

Karen Buck: I, too, welcome the thoughtful way in which the hon. Gentleman is approaching this topic. I entirely endorse what he said about the majority of young people being law-abiding and going about their business as excellent young citizens in the making. Does he agree, however, that one issue with which all of us—politicians and others—need to engage is the fact that there is a fear race going on out there? As the evidence taken by our Select Committee confirmed, young people are often frightened of the streets, and frightened of the images conveyed to them about other people carrying weapons. We have a serious duty to get the balance right, and our media colleagues have a serious duty to help us.

Chris Grayling: That is absolutely true. We should not seek to create a climate of fear. In the vast majority of our communities, this is not the issue that it is in some inner-city areas, although there are certainly law-and-order problems up and down the country involving antisocial behaviour and some criminality. Happily, the incidence of serious knife crime remains limited to a relatively small number of communities, but it is there none the less, and it is to protect young people that we need to continue this debate. They are far more likely to be the victims of knife crime, and to be scarred for life or even worse. It is for their protection that we need to get this right.
	The reality of the situation is quite stark. The level of fatal stabbings is the highest on record. There has been a 34 per cent. increase in the number of people killed by sharp instruments such as knives in recent years. The number of people stabbed to death in England and Wales increased from 201 a decade ago to 270 in 2007-08, the highest figure on record. That is a serious problem. A serious knife crime—although not a homicide—is committed every hour. According to recent figures, 22,151 serious offences involving knives were recorded in England and Wales in 2008. That is equivalent to 400 a week, or one every half hour. We are dealing with a major problem, although it is more confined to some communities than to others.
	The Select Committee's report highlights the contradictions that exist between some of the figures that are available. There have certainly been improvements in some areas covered by Government programmes, although I must say that I should have been worried if there had not been, given the money that has been spent. Equally, however, there is an inescapable pattern that illustrates the scale of the problem.
	The Committee points out that there has been a big increase in the number of knife injuries since the mid-1990s, as is made clear by hospital episode statistics, and that the biggest increase has taken place since 2006. There is also an alarmingly high propensity to carry knives. A 2008 MORI youth survey indicated that 31 per cent. of 11 to 16-year-olds in mainstream education and 61 per cent. of excluded young people had carried a weapon at some point during the preceding year. Of course those figures are bound to mask some legitimate activity, such as the carrying of a penknife by a boy scout, but the overall picture is nevertheless unhappy. The Committee also points out that random knife crime against strangers is relatively rare, although the terrible attack in Grimsby this week is an indication that it remains a threat.
	I believe—and here my view may differ slightly from the Select Committee's interpretation—that the real problem lies in the gang culture in many areas. Whether kids carry knives because they are in gangs or because they are afraid of gangs—the point made by the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck)—in many areas it is the gang culture that drives the problem, and I think that we must break that gang culture if we are to deal with the problem of knife crime.

Humfrey Malins: As I am sure my hon. Friend accepts, gang culture exists not only out in the community but, increasingly, on the young offender prison estate. On admission to custody, the first thing that young offenders almost certainly do is join a gang, which causes tremendous trouble on the estate.

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend makes an important point. He knows about the reality of the situation from his professional experience, and he has taken an active interest in young offender institutions, their workings and their failings. I have visited a number of such institutions, and I share his concern about the fact that the gang culture is being perpetuated within prison walls—as, indeed, are some other problems that we face.
	The root causes of the gang culture that leads to knife crime lie right across the policy spectrum, but they tend to be found in the same geographical areas. If we were to map out geographically rates of worklessness, family breakdown, educational failure and addiction in the family, we would find a high correlation between social breakdown and the gang culture, and the report makes it clear that there is a link between deprivation, gang membership and knife crime.

Karen Buck: Is the hon. Gentleman also aware of research by the Sutton Trust, an educational research organisation, that importantly confirmed the apparent correlation between certain types of violent crime and inequality? It is not just a question of deprivation equalling violence; the sharp impact of inequalities in society unfortunately also has an influence on how some people behave.

Chris Grayling: The hon. Lady makes an important point, which she might elaborate on if she makes a speech later.
	The truth is that those who join gangs often come from the most difficult family backgrounds—from an environment where they feel neglected and unwanted. Gang membership brings a perverse sense of belonging that they might not ever have got at home. It also exposes them to the danger of being exploited by the hardcore who build gangs around them, and increasingly by organised criminals who exploit local gangs for illegal trade, particularly in drugs. Some younger children are also vulnerable to being used by older gang members as caddies and—I know this from talking to young people in such circumstances—for carrying and hiding firearms. The Select Committee was right to seek information from the Home Office about the number of prosecutions in relation to caddies under the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006, and I hope the Home Secretary will make reference to this issue in his speech.

Andrew Love: The hon. Gentleman is making a thoughtful contribution. I do not disagree with any of his points about what kinds of young people are most likely to become gang members, but in my constituency I have been particularly concerned about the dynamics of gang activity. We wanted to set up a youth facility in a school that crossed a geographical boundary, but many young people in my community—both those who did belong to gangs and those who did not—were not prepared to cross it. We have to understand more about gang dynamics if we are to make an impact on this problem.

Chris Grayling: The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and it illustrates why we must have community groups on the ground engaging in these problems. They understand the problems best, and former gang members can also be a powerful influence in trying to encourage young people who are a part of gangs away from them. They, more than anyone else, understand gang culture.
	I am also in no doubt that tougher police action to smash up gangs is necessary. We have to break up the hardcore, and also, in a constructive way, peel away those around the fringes. Those two elements of the strategy are extremely important. To that end, the Select Committee has made a number of valuable suggestions. I do not agree with every one of its recommendations, but I think the report should provide a reference point for debating the issues.
	I was particularly struck by the Committee's comments about the influence of violent videos and video games on those with a propensity to violence. In most cases for most children, playing a violent video game is not going to turn them into a knife-wielding troublemaker, but for some it clearly can. The Committee's comments about the presence of such material in detention institutions also raised a concern.
	The Committee is right to highlight the need both to break down barriers between young people and the police and to address the reasons some young people seek "respect" on the streets. I also agree with it on the need for improved intervention at the point where a young person is excluded from school. However, there is in my view one area that can make a particularly great difference. In my evidence to the Select Committee, I focused on the need for early intervention. I believe that a successful battle against emerging antisocial behaviour can play an important role in combating more serious offences, particularly knife crime. As a society we do not intervene early enough to say no to a young miscreant. Most serious knife criminals are young men in their later teens, but all the anecdotal evidence I have been given is that they are often the same young men who three or four years earlier were responsible for less serious acts of antisocial behaviour in their communities. Not every 13 or 14-year-old troublemaker goes on to commit more serious offences—far from it—but some do, and we could do more to stop them.

Karen Buck: Does the hon. Gentleman agree, therefore, that we should be ensuring at least a guarantee of continuance, but preferably an expansion, of some of the early intervention programmes that we have been developing, such as the youth intervention programmes and the youth offending teams? We have rolled out a range of early intervention schemes in recent years and their continuation is utterly reliant on Government funding.

Chris Grayling: I shall go on to say a little more about how we need a mix of intervention to rein back and constructive engagement.

Philip Hollobone: I congratulate my hon. Friend on his remarks—he is absolutely right about this antisocial behaviour point. My local police in Kettering have told me that they know who all the teenage troublemakers are and they are becoming increasingly frustrated that they do not really have the powers to deal with the problem effectively. The Home Office is rolling out the fixed penalty notice scheme in six police forces around the country, whereby they will be able to issue notices to teenagers below the age of 16. That is not available at the moment in Northamptonshire, but it is a tool that the local police would very much like to have, because they could use it to deal effectively with the ringleaders and troublemakers among teenage groups.

Chris Grayling: I agree with my hon. Friend that we need simple powers to be able to intervene early; indeed, I was going to set out some of the ways in which such change might work. We need a quicker, more comprehensive programme of early interventions designed to stop young people going off the rails without their being pushed straight into the criminal justice system and getting a criminal record that will blight their future. Far too often interventions are made too late in a teenager's life and by the time the criminal justice system is brought into play irreversible behaviours have built themselves into that person's life.
	That does not mean that young people should not face the full force of the law if they have committed a serious offence—there will always be a need for some to be arrested and prosecuted because they have done so—but earlier, lighter and more straightforward interventions should be available to try to rein them back. As the Home Secretary will know, I have argued for a 21st century version of the clip round the ear: a series of swift, fair measures that can be deployed more nimbly than some of the cumbersome measures that are in place. That was what the Government originally intended with antisocial behaviour orders, but in the end they have created a system that takes too long to implement.

Christopher Huhne: The hon. Gentleman mentioned the importance of using serious penalties when necessary, so are the official Opposition still in favour of a presumption of a custodial sentence for all knife carriers?

Chris Grayling: If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I will address that specific point a little later in my remarks—I will answer his question.
	What we have proposed at this stage of the process is giving the police simple powers—working with a local magistrate—to issue grounding orders to young troublemakers and to apply simple community service penalties that do not give those young people a long-term criminal record. There will, of course, be instances where people break the law and use a knife to attack someone, and we need to have punishments available to break this cycle. That is why we also need tougher enforcement and sentencing. The precursor of a tougher approach on knife crime is getting more police officers out from behind desks and on to the streets, which is why it is so important that the Home Secretary continues to see through, and accelerates, the process of reducing police bureaucracy and paperwork, and why he will find, as he takes on his new job, that progress in some areas has been too slow. I hope that he will be able to accelerate things.
	We also need to get much tougher when sentencing young people who are caught carrying knives or who commit other knife crimes. The issue of whether sentences should be custodial was extensively debated by the Select Committee—and with me when I gave evidence to it. I do not think that the current system imposes sufficiently stiff penalties. That must change because we need to create an environment where the default is not to carry a knife and where there is a big risk in carrying a knife, so that those who are more likely to offend do not do so and those who are afraid do not need to do so.
	The starting point should be that anyone carrying a knife without a reasonable excuse should expect to be prosecuted—there are still those who are let off with a caution. We should make it clear that people convicted of carrying a knife should expect to receive a custodial sentence.
	I made the point to the Select Committee that the presumption should be that offenders will be sent to jail. The minimum sentence should be a community penalty, with the offender doing positive work in the community, not a fine or a caution. We should not remove all discretion from the courts, the Crown Prosecution Service or the police, but if the norm is a tough penalty it will have the effect of deterring many people from carrying knives in the first place and removing the pressure to carry them that some feel.

Justine Greening: My hon. Friend makes an important point. Part of what is needed is certainty, so that people who are committing crimes know what will be the consequence if they are caught. Part of the problem is that too many community sentences such as the intensive supervision and surveillance programme see routine breaches that do not lead to any comeback on the offender. Does he agree that there is a danger that that builds in a sense that people can break the rules and get away with it?

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a danger in the criminal justice system that we do not see things through, whether it is the enforcement of an antisocial behaviour order or the enforcement of a community penalty. If people see that they can get away with things, they will not respect the law. It is fundamentally important that if there is a penalty, we see it through and do not just let it lapse.

Rob Marris: On penalties, will the shadow Home Secretary indicate what he believes the age of criminal responsibility should be?

Chris Grayling: I see no reason to change the age of criminal responsibility at the moment, but I want those who carry knives around in their teenage years to be brought before the law and dealt with accordingly. I do not want a seven-year-old who is being used as a caddy to be prosecuted, I want the person using them as a caddy to be prosecuted. That is how the law should work.

Emily Thornberry: What about an 11-year-old who has brought a knife out from home? Would the hon. Gentleman decide that that was criminal activity?

Chris Grayling: It clearly would be criminal activity, but if we get things right and create an environment in which we have tough sanctions for people caught carrying a knife, 11-year-olds will not feel the need to do so. That is the step that we have to take. We must create an environment in which people feel that there is a risk in carrying a knife, and therefore do not choose to do so. The risk that we can offer is a penalty that they will not wish to receive.

Jim Cunningham: Does the hon. Gentleman believe that another matter that we should examine in relation to knives is the people who sell them? There have been many problems with them in the past and quite a lot of debates about the matter in the House. What is his view about that?

Chris Grayling: I would be open to all ideas as to how we can restrict the sale of knives to young people, and many retailers seek to do that. The problem is that it is not difficult for someone to buy a Sabatier kitchen knife from Sainsbury's, pass it to one of the kids in their gang and go out and cause mayhem. That is the challenge—in our society, a knife is not a difficult thing to get hold of. We can take every step we want to restrict their sale, but ultimately that is a big problem for us.
	There is one other area in which we need much tougher action. Drug dealing is endemic in many areas affected by knife crime. The Government have given out mixed messages about drugs in recent years, not just on classification but on sentencing policy and implementation. The truth is that we let off a significant proportion of drug dealers with just a caution, even those dealing in class A drugs such as heroin. That cannot be right, and it must change.
	The Home Affairs Committee was absolutely right about the need for projects that engage and distract young people. We need both the carrot and the stick to deal with the problems of youth crime and knife crime. Up and down the country really worthwhile youth projects are helping, particularly in areas of deprivation where serious trouble and criminality can develop. There is the Frontline church's youth work in Liverpool, Friday night football in Hampshire—in the constituency of the hon. Member for Eastleigh, where I commend the work being done by his local police—and martial arts work in Derbyshire. Those are all examples that I have seen in recent months of work being done to engage young people and get them away from an environment in which they may get into trouble.

Philip Hollobone: To add to my hon. Friend's list, may I mention young firefighter schemes? Another big problem area of teenage crime is arson, particularly of school premises. Active participation in such schemes kills two birds with one stone.

Chris Grayling: I absolutely agree, and I pay tribute to fire services up and down the country that, along with their more straightforward work of putting out fires and cutting people out of wrecked cars, are doing serious work in engaging young people and involving them in life around fire stations and fire services. They are helping in the engagement process.

Stephen Crabb: My hon. Friend makes an important point about the importance of youth activity. May I also remind him of the importance of youth leaders being able to challenge young people who carry and use knives? Some 10 years ago I was a volunteer youth worker in Peckham and Bermondsey in south London and I remember having to ask the young people to leave their knives at the entrance when they came in to play basketball. The fact that young people participate in a youth activity does not mean that they stop their offending behaviour. That needs challenging by strong youth leaders.

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend is right, and one of the things that make for an especially strong youth project is the leader, and their credibility in the eyes of those who participate. If it is someone who has been there, who knows and understands the streets, and who can challenge that behaviour, it is more likely to succeed.
	The Centre for Social Justice and the Damilola Taylor Trust are offering awards to those who lead the most innovative projects in deprived areas, and the Mayor of London has set up several mentoring and engagement programmes for young Londoners that have the potential to make a real difference. However, as the Select Committee points out in its report, there are too few volunteers in too many areas to do everything that could be done. As Members of Parliament, we can all encourage volunteering in our communities and support it where it takes place.

Jim Cunningham: The hon. Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone) has a point. We have similar problems in Coventry, and the Rotarians run a scheme every year that involves the police, the fire brigade and several voluntary organisations. They show kids the consequences of stealing a car and wrapping it around a tree. It is a very worthwhile scheme, and that is the sort of thing that we should consider.

Chris Grayling: The hon. Gentleman is right. For many of the young people who take part in such schemes, who come from the most deprived backgrounds, it is a new experience to have something positive to do and to be engaged in constructive activity. That is why the carrot—the community work and the support locally—is so important.
	This is not a battle that any of us can afford to lose. Week after week, we hear reports of young people whose lives have been tragically cut short or who have suffered terrible injuries at the hands of other young people carrying knives. The Government have brought forward several initiatives, but the danger is always that Home Office initiatives just cost money and do not make much difference. I suspect that success will not lie simply with the efforts of this Government or a future one—albeit sincere and well meant—but with the way in which we harness the efforts of our whole society to try to turn back this unwelcome tide. It is important to ensure that in these difficult financial times the smaller voluntary projects that can make a disproportionate difference are not the first to be squeezed financially.
	We have to tackle the root causes of worklessness, educational failure and family breakdown, and we have to foster a revolution in what we have dubbed our broken society. But we also need to deliver the direct, on-the-ground support that can steer those young people caught up in the knife culture away from it. The Damilola Taylor Trust and the Prince's Trust are spearheading the "no to knives" coalition to seek to make a difference. I hope and believe that harnessing different groups to do what we as politicians cannot do on our own will help to create a coalition that can really transform things on the ground. I commend the groups involved in that work. They have the support of the present Government and will have the support of a future Conservative Government in continuing that work. We all want to see the day when serious youth knife crime is a thing of the past. Our job is to work together to bring that day about as quickly as possible.

Alan Johnson: I beg to move an amendment, at end add:
	"further recognises that tougher penalties are being implemented against those who commit knife crimes, including a rise in the proportion of those caught carrying knives getting custodial sentences; supports the expectation to prosecute for knife possession and doubling of the maximum sentence for carrying a knife in public from two to four years; recognises that the Government has backed tough police enforcement action in the tackling knives action programme areas, including increased use of stop and search, noting that there were nearly 200,000 stop and searches, resulting in the recovery of over 3,500 knives, between June 2008 and March 2009; welcomes the additional investment going to providing targeted youth activity, including on Friday and Saturday nights; and welcomes recent provisional NHS figures showing a reduction in hospital admissions of teenagers following assaults by sharp objects."
	I thank the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) for his remarks and his welcome to me as Home Secretary. I do indeed remember the last time we faced each other over the Dispatch Box—

Rob Marris: You won!

Alan Johnson: I like to think that the nation won— [ Laughter. ] On any disagreements that we have at the moment, the hon. Gentleman may catch up in a couple of years. We were talking about variable tuition fees—we do not call them top-up fees—and at the time he and his party were staunchly against them, but now they are very much for them. That is probably a prerequisite for the debates that we will have about home affairs.
	I welcome this opportunity to debate this important issue for the first time with the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell and his Opposition colleagues, and with other Members. I do not think that there is anything at all in the Opposition motion with which we would disagree and the spirit in which it was moved reflects the importance that we all place on tackling knife crime. It also reflects the concern about knife crime felt on both sides of this House.

Rob Marris: I welcome my right hon. Friend to his post. May I particularly welcome from the Back Benches the Government's approach to this debate? The amendment before us this afternoon is an addition to the Opposition main motion, and does not traduce it. That is a welcome change.

Alan Johnson: According to the "A.B.C of Chairmanship" by Lord Citrine, on which I was raised, we would call our change an addendum, rather than an amendment, but there we are. I think that that is the right spirit in which to tackle this issue.
	I am also pleased that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell welcomed the recent report from the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which has made such a valuable contribution to this debate.
	The tragic cases of youngsters killed because of knife crime in London and elsewhere have shocked and saddened the nation. Reducing knife crime and crime among young people more widely is of paramount importance, not only because of the need to deal with the very small minority of young people who are persistent offenders and who cause considerable anxiety and harm to their victims, families and communities, but because addressing the issues that can lead to criminality among young people is essential for a fairer, safer society.
	The Government's addendum is designed to ensure that the progress that is being made by the hard work of so many people is properly recognised. First, on the more general issue of youth crime, it is encouraging to see that the numbers of young people entering the criminal justice system for the first time fell by 9.4 per cent. between 2006-07 and 2007-08. Between 2000 and 2007, the frequency of reoffending among young people fell by 23 per cent.

Mark Pritchard: I congratulate the Secretary of State on his promotion. On the philosophy of behaviour, how confident is he that all young people know that murder is wrong and that it is at the apex of antisocial behaviour not because it breaks the law or because a custodial sentence might be handed out to them by a judge but because it breaks behavioural norms and the moral order in society? What does the Secretary of State believe is the benchmark by which young people judge that murder is unacceptable?

Alan Johnson: I believe that it would offend all civilised values to think that any young person—other than, perhaps, young people from the most deprived and difficult backgrounds, who have experienced such violence from their early years—would believe that murder was anything other than a crime, and a heinous crime at that. I am not quite sure what point the hon. Gentleman is raising. However, if it is that we have to reinforce these arguments and to consider things such as video games—I welcome their inclusion in the Select Committee's report—and that we have to ensure that the message of how heinous such crimes are is reinforced to young people over and over again, not just by figures who they would see as figures of authority but by peer groups and people in their community, his point is well taken.

Diane Abbott: On the question of young people's attitude to murder, is it not perhaps so much that they think that murder is acceptable but that they believe in their gangs and their communities that anything is acceptable when it comes to enforcing respect, to territorial defence of their gang or to demonstrating how much of a man they are? It is such attitudes that we have to undermine.

Alan Johnson: From all my experience, I think that my hon. Friend is absolutely right. Incidentally, my press office had arranged for me to meet some police on Westminster's Churchill Gardens estate yesterday and to walk around for my first on-camera shot as Home Secretary. By a real coincidence, that was where I was badly assaulted when I was 15. I came from the rough end of Notting Hill, and thought that this was a posh area of Pimlico, but the problem was a territorial thing because we were in an area that was not our territory.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) is absolutely right to say that such attitudes are ingrained in people, but sometimes they can be reinforced by the things that they see and read. That is why I want to repeat that the Home Affairs Committee has done us a service by mentioning the fact that people feel that they have to go to that extra level to prove how hard and tough they are, and how much harder and tougher they are than the other gang.

Henry Bellingham: I was delighted to hear the Home Secretary say a moment ago that recidivism was falling. That is very positive, but does he share my concern about a small number of dangerous offenders who are convicted and imprisoned? Does he agree that, before they are released on licence, there must be a proper risk assessment and an absolute guarantee of ongoing supervision and monitoring?

Alan Johnson: I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Although I have not absorbed every aspect of this job in the last couple of days, my sense is that what he describes is already happening, and on an increasing basis, so that is an important contribution.
	The youth crime action plan launched in the summer of last year is not only helping to bring young offenders to account for their actions, but is providing more support to address the underlying causes of poor behaviour. It places a greater focus on prevention to tackle the low-level but serious problems such as truancy or exclusion that put young people at increased risk of becoming involved in crime or antisocial behaviour.
	Family intervention projects, which provide intensive and non-negotiable support for families living in chaotic circumstances, are having a remarkable impact. They are improving school attendance and behaviour, reducing incidences of domestic violence, and improving parenting skills. Operation Staysafe is preventing vulnerable young people from being drawn into criminal activity. The police remove youngsters from the streets late at night—a sort of 21st century version of the clip round the ear—and work with social services to establish what further interventions may be necessary to prevent them becoming victims of crime, or indeed, offenders.
	There are now around 5,300 Safer Schools partnerships fostering better relationships between police and young people, with dedicated police officers working in schools to help tackle the causes of crime and antisocial behaviour. After-school patrols on bus routes and at transport hubs are tackling antisocial behaviour at school closing time, giving greater reassurance to parents and pupils.

Philip Hollobone: I am pleased that the Home Secretary has moved on to the issue of parental responsibility. When I went out with the local police in Kettering, a number of teenagers were causing trouble and the police took them home to their families—who did not want to know. In fact, they were cross with the police for bringing the children back, so what more can the Government do to emphasise the point that parents have a big role to play in the activities that their teenagers get up to?

Alan Johnson: The next stage would be parenting orders or family contracts, and there is a range of other measures that can be used. I discussed this matter with a chief constable only this morning and I was told that, although some parents do not take full responsibility and act in an unacceptable way, the approach that the hon. Gentleman has described works on many occasions. It is a simple thing, but very effective. It always amazes me that, before the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the police did not have the power to take a truant back to school, let alone take a child back home. The simple powers that the police have asked for are very necessary, in my view.
	I have talked about the more general issue of youth crime but, on the specific issue of knife crime, there are now tougher penalties for those who carry knives. The maximum sentence has been doubled and those convicted are more likely to go to prison. The age at which a person may purchase a knife has been raised to 18 and it is now an offence to mind a weapon on someone else's behalf.
	In June last year, my right hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith), my predecessor as Home Secretary, to whom I pay tribute for the work that she has done in this post over the past two years, launched the tackling knives action programme focused on 10 police forces across England and Wales rapidly to address the issue of knife crime in those areas. We now have an extended programme covering 16 areas, and have invested a total of £12 million. The programme is not only taking knives off the streets. It is also improving understanding among young people of the dangers of knife possession. As the Home Affairs Committee report acknowledged last week, there has been a notable reduction in hospital admissions for stab wounds in the areas where the programme is running.
	Our amendment to the motion welcomes provisional figures published last month, which suggested a substantial reduction in the number of hospital admissions caused by the assault with a knife or sharp object of 13 to 19-year-olds for the 12 months ending January 2009 compared with the same period the previous year. Since the amendment was published just yesterday, a more recent set of figures published this morning shows that the trend is continuing, with a drop of 22 per cent. in admissions of teenagers with stab wounds during the tackling knives action programme implementation period from June 2008 to February 2009, compared with the same period the previous year. Provisional figures show a drop of 26 per cent. across England and a fall of 30 per cent. in nine tackling knives action programme areas.

Keith Vaz: I welcome the Home Secretary to his new post. I know that he will be a terrific success in all the challenges that he will face over the next few years.  [ Interruption. ] With reference to his kind words about the Home Affairs Committee report, which we gratefully accept, one of the key points that we made on admissions to hospitals was that it was important that information should be shared between agencies. For example, the NHS trust in Manchester shares its information with the police and other agencies. Is it not important that that should happen across the country? That is one way to tackle the problem in a particular area.

Alan Johnson: I am tempted to blame the Health Secretary for the present state of affairs. May I say how much I appreciate my right hon. Friend's contribution in this area, which, as Home Secretary, I know I will appreciate even more? When I was Secretary of State for Health, we made it clear in the operating framework, which is an important document for the health service and used to be called their marching orders, that it was a tier 3 local priority to exchange information and to engage and co-operate in this way. As a result, double the number of hospitals now provide the information. I accept that we have to go further, but that is an important result, given that we made it an operating framework tier 3 priority only last December. We are on the right track.
	The figures are extremely encouraging. During the action plan's first phase, there were 200,000 stop and searches and 3,500 knives were seized.

Emily Thornberry: I welcome my right hon. Friend to his new post. My area is one in which the action programme has been introduced because of the problems that we have had with knife crime, resulting in a number of deaths, ending, unfortunately, with Ben Kinsella's murder last summer. Youngsters were afraid to go out on the street because they thought other people were carrying knives, so they carried them themselves. The introduction of random stop and search among all young people was extremely helpful in putting a cap on the carrying of knives. I commend the policy.

Alan Johnson: It is valuable to get that first-hand experience from one of the TKAP areas. I am sure that that experience is repeated elsewhere.

David Davies: I am grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way, and I echo those comments. However, he will surely realise that there is no such thing as random stop and search; it can be carried out only when a section 60 power is in place, and then it lasts for only 24 hours. Is that not one of the problems that he might want to address—how to enable random stop and searches in areas where there are real problems?

Alan Johnson: I acknowledge the special knowledge—the special constable knowledge, even—of the hon. Gentleman. I shall look at that issue, but, once again, my discussion with the chief constable of Warwickshire this morning suggested what the figures show—that, after eight months, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. These are eighth month statistics: 3,500 knives seized from 200,000 stop and searches. So we are at least on the right road, but, of course, I shall look at other issues.

Emily Thornberry: In Islington, if an area had particular problems, the police were given for a limited period but for much longer than 24 hours the power to stop all youngsters, and that really helped.

Alan Johnson: I do not like to intervene in the conversation about stop and search, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The Select Committee was right, however, to raise the concern that a small number of young people are worried about their safety and feel that they need to carry knives to protect themselves. Senior police officers have told us that the fact that fewer stop and searches now uncover a weapon suggests that the number being carried is declining further. But it is absolutely critical that we get the message across to young people that carrying a knife does not make them safer.
	The advertising campaign "It Doesn't Have to Happen" has been designed by young people, for young people, with that precise purpose. Aimed at 10 to 16-year-olds, the adverts portray unflinchingly the physical effects of knife wounds and have been viewed more than 13 million times. Of those youngsters surveyed, 73 per cent. said that they were less likely to carry a knife as a result of seeing the advert.
	Through the Be Safe programme, 1 million young people will be able to attend workshops over the next five years on the dangers of knives and other weapons. We cannot be the slightest bit complacent, and one knife crime is one too many, but police forces tell us of encouraging signs that knife carrying is falling among young people, and the statistics on NHS admissions and on crimes committed support that view. Between October and December 2008, there were seven fewer fatal stabbings compared with the same period the previous year.
	I completely agree with the reference in the Opposition's motion to "cross-community co-operation". Community and voluntary sector organisations have a crucial role to play in tackling knife crime. The motion is right to praise the work of the Damilola Taylor Trust, and I mention in particular Damilola Taylor's father, Richard Taylor, who was appointed by the Prime Minister in February to be his special envoy on youth violence and knife crime.

Keith Vaz: I am most grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way a second time. We in the Select Committee were very keen to ensure that our report was not a knee-jerk reaction to another tragic death; that is why we took six months to complete it. We have also decided that, at the end of July, we will bring the stakeholders together to consider the report's conclusions thoughtfully. I am very pleased that the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), has agreed to participate in that seminar, and I hope that the Home Secretary will also find the time to come along and give us his views on the issue—as a way of keeping the issue going and retaining the consensus, which is extremely important. Without the stakeholders working together, no single agency can solve the problem of an increase in knife crime.

Alan Johnson: That is a very important development. Around that time, after the first year of the tackling knives action programme, we will be hosting an event, so perhaps we could combine the two in some way. I shall talk to my right hon. Friend about that.
	It has been acknowledged that projects that work with young people and provide peer mentoring, diversionary activities, education and training can help prevent them from becoming offenders. That is why investing in better local services and activities for young people is so important, and, through the youth opportunity fund and the youth capital fund, and schemes such as the myplace programme, we are providing a total of £900 million to improve local services for young people. The best providers of such services are often local and community groups, which have a profound knowledge of the area and the needs of the people with whom they work. Over the next three years, we have specifically earmarked £4.5 million to help up to 150 local groups that are working to tackle knife crime, gun crime, and gang-related activity. We will announce the successful bidders for money from that fund next week.

Justine Greening: rose—

Alan Johnson: I will give way one final time.

Justine Greening: On that point, apparently 20 per cent. of volunteers in Britain are male, and 80 per cent. are female. Obviously, many of the issues that we are discussing relate to male role models, or a lack of them. Does the Home Secretary have any views on what we could do to encourage more men in our communities to get involved and play a role in helping to be role models for young adults—younger males—whom they could probably help with the benefit of their experience?

Alan Johnson: The Minister of State, Home Department, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), just reminded me about Baroness Neuberger's report on volunteering. Also, I know from my constituency that every year, in volunteers' week, a special push is made to get people who do not normally volunteer—sometimes that is men, but it is other groups in our community, too—to realise the benefits of volunteering. There is more that we can do in that regard.
	The issue of knife crime among young people is serious, and the motion rightly reflects that fact, but the tackling knives action programme is showing encouraging early signs of success. Through tougher action on those who offend and a greater focus on the causes of knife crime, and through excellent leadership and strong partnerships between the police, schools, social services and community groups, properly organised and adequately funded, I believe that we can address an issue that is rightly seen by the public as absolutely critical to the well-being of our society.
	The issue will be one of my major priorities in the coming months. Along with the Secretaries of State for Justice and for Children, Schools and Families, I will host an event in July, as I have said, to discuss the outcomes and experiences of the first year of the tackling knives action programme, and will consider what further steps need to be taken to keep knives off our streets. I commend the Opposition for tabling the motion, and I commend the amendment to the House.

Christopher Huhne: I, too, very much welcome the tone and the approach taken by the official Opposition, who have given us an opportunity to discuss this key issue. I also very much welcome the approach taken by the Home Affairs Committee in its attempt to build cross-party consensus, which hopefully can make real progress on the issue. May I also welcome the new Home Secretary to his post? I look forward to lively debate with him in the coming weeks and months, in the hope that I may agree with him on Home Office policy as much as I do on electoral reform.
	The official Opposition are absolutely right in their motion: knife crime is one of the most serious problems facing Britain today. The number of children admitted to hospital having been assaulted with knives has gone up by 83 per cent. in five years. That is frankly shocking, but sadly there are no simple solutions, as we have heard; there is, perhaps, consensus across the House on that. We need a response from the education and health services, the police and the criminal justice system, so I was heartened to see the emphasis on cross-community co-operation to address the root causes of knife crime in the motion, and to hear it in the speech of the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). That appears to us to be a new emphasis, which we welcome.
	There is, however, still a clear distinction between the approach of Liberal Democrat Members on the one hand, and the approach of the Opposition and the Government on the other. That is highlighted in the addendum to the motion that the Government propose. Those two parties still continuously seek to try to outdo one another by advocating tougher penalties, which in the main serve to criminalise young people. By contrast, we believe that what is needed is an effective system of prevention that tackles the root causes of why people, particularly young people, carry knives, and which is coupled with targeted, intelligence-led, visible policing. We need to reassure young people that they do not need to carry knives for their own safety, and we need the support of the community to catch and convict those who threaten others.
	Last year, 43 young people died from stab wounds. Of the 773 homicides in Britain in 2007-08, 270—35 per cent., or a little over a third—were caused by sharp instruments. That is the highest number of knife killings since records began in 1997, and it represents an increase of a third since that year. There was a 48 per cent. increase in stab-related hospital admissions between 1997-98 and 2006-07, and nearly 50,000 people, including 4,510 children, have been treated in hospital for knife wounds since the Government came to power.
	Knife crime disproportionately affects young people. Between 2003 and 2007, stab-related hospital admissions for under-16s increased by 63 per cent. The Youth Justice Board's 2008 MORI youth survey found that 17 per cent. of 11 to 16-year-olds in mainstream education had carried a knife in the previous year; the figure rises to 54 per cent. among young people who have been excluded from school. Some 85 per cent. of young people who carry knives claim that they do so for their own protection.
	Those statistics speak for themselves. The toll of knife crime is horrendous and its increasing regularity is rightly fixed in the public consciousness as an overwhelming problem. There can be few more graphic or horrifying thoughts for any parent than that of their child being attacked with a knife. The images that we have seen in the media of the devastation wrought by knife crime over the past few months and years remain a harrowing reminder of the damage that these crimes can do.
	The Government have made progress in tackling knife crime, but the problem remains far too large. In the eight months to November 2008, 3,259 people were admitted to hospital in England with stab wounds; that was a fall of 9 per cent. on the same period in the previous year, but it still represents a very substantial level. Furthermore, 604 of the victims were teenagers.
	The tentative improvements are welcome, but they are far from being enough. Despite the evident escalation in the problem during the Government's period in power, Ministers have clearly not given the sustained priority to tackling the problem that it deserves. We had some sense of the issue in the exchange between the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee and the Home Secretary earlier in this debate, but to our continuing amazement Ministers have not fully implemented tactics that have been proven to work dramatically to reduce the problem. I shall come back to that issue in detail.
	The effective policing of knife crime is about intelligence-led stop and search. Many people on estates where the problem is most serious know exactly who the menace is, but they are afraid to say. Visible and approachable policing is essential, not just for reassurance—as I said, many young people carry knives because they are afraid, not because they intend to use them—but for intelligence gathering. Metal detecting arches and wands used by police have helped to tackle knife crime, with outstanding success in areas such as Newham in east London, where I have seen them in operation.
	However, one of the most effective means of reducing knife crime has not been rolled out nationally—in part, I suspect, because it needs co-operation between the Department of Health and the Home Office. I am referring to the so-called Cardiff model, which was created six years ago by Professor Jonathan Shepherd, a surgeon in Cardiff. The aim of the model is to improve police effectiveness and reduce emergency department admissions for violent crime-related injuries.
	The accident and emergency department collects anonymous data on the precise location and time of the violent incident when patients first attend. Those data are shared by the hospital trust with the crime and disorder reduction partnership. The partnership then produces maps of violent crime, including knife crime, for its area, allowing the police to track violent crime trends and allocate resources to violent crime hot spots accordingly. That proven technique has cut hospital admissions for violence-related attendances by 40 per cent. in Cardiff. That information is from a peer-reviewed study: it is good, hard, solid evidence. In Cardiff's Home Office family of 15 similar cities, it went from mid-table in 2002 to safest city in May 2007. In a recent study for the think-tank Reform, Cardiff was 51st out of 55 towns and cities with a population of more than 100,000 in terms of incidences of robbery or assault.
	In other words, the experiment clearly worked. It began in 2002, and the Department of Health commissioned a paper from Professor Shepherd in 2004. It was updated again, explicitly for the then Health Secretary, who is now Home Secretary, in October 2007. However, a parliamentary question that I tabled both to the Home Office and to the Department of Health in November 2008 revealed that information on hospitals running such a scheme was not centrally collected. I am pleased that the Home Secretary has provided some evidence of progress in rolling out the scheme, but when will all hospitals be applying it and co-operating with their local police services? When, indeed, will all hospitals in TKAP areas be co-operating? My office had to submit a freedom of information request to all English NHS trusts, which revealed that as of today, of 135 relevant trusts that answered my request, only 29 share data in this way—just over 21 per cent.
	I am pleased that the Home Affairs Committee has picked up on this point, which I made to it in evidence. At paragraph 39 of its conclusions, it says:
	"We were disappointed to learn that this has not been fully implemented throughout England and Wales and recommend that this is done immediately. All agencies within partnerships should have an equal duty to share."
	This should not be a political issue: it is very straightforward. We know that the scheme leads to dramatic falls in cutting knife crime—it is an easy hit—but it has one major snag: it involves two Government Departments working together on a matter of overwhelming priority for the public, and I am afraid that until now they have signally failed to do so.

Alan Johnson: Will the hon. Gentleman place on record, for the sake of my successor as Health Secretary, that he is saying that we should insist from the centre that every local acute trust must adopt this system? I say that because I have spent the past two years being lectured by Liberal Democrat Front Benchers about the need to devolve power to the front line and not to engage in central direction.

Christopher Huhne: That is an absolutely splendid smokescreen from the former Secretary of State for Health, not least because he knows very well that the only elected person in charge of the national health service is the Secretary of State for Health. I am convinced that if the NHS had accountability to elected people on the lines proposed by the Liberal Democrats the change would have been far more dramatic. People want knife crime to be tackled, and they do not want a load of excuses from one part of Government about not delivering on an objective set by another part of Government.

Keith Vaz: I thank the hon. Gentleman for the evidence that he gave to the Select Committee and the useful comments that he made about Cardiff. I agree with him. Of course it is important that local areas should make decisions on their own, but where, as in this respect, there is a clear-cut case for the sharing of information because it will help other agencies to ensure that knife crime is reduced, it is important that the Government accept that recommendation and implement it.

Christopher Huhne: Absolutely. We have had so many examples, over so many years, of this extraordinary Gosplan centralism applied to the NHS and to many other public services, in theory delivering the same standard of service across the country but completely failing to do so because the levers are not connected. Perhaps the former Health Secretary would like to come back to the Dispatch Box to explain why it has taken so long for the Department of Health to deliver on this overwhelming public objective, which, after all, came as an initiative from within the Department—from a surgeon who was fed up with fixing the faces of young people who were damaged by knife crime.
	Why has it taken so long? The Government launched the tackling knives action programme in June 2008, part of which was to implement data sharing between hospitals and the police. In none of the nine TKAP areas were all A and E departments sharing data in that way, and in three areas—Essex, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire—no A and E departments shared data. Perhaps the Home Secretary would like to tell us why even the areas that were running the scheme did not apply it. There is such an obvious case for the scheme—for public health reasons and the objective that we all share of tackling knife crime.
	Will the Home Secretary also tell us why the TKAP programme, despite its success, ran for less than a year before being incorporated into the Home Office's violent crime unit? Surely any solution to knife crime must be a long-term commitment, not a flash in the pan and a headline-grabbing gimmick.
	Further evidence, if it were needed, that the Government have not taken knife crime seriously in the past is the failure to collect the relevant statistics. The British crime survey started collecting data from under-16s—a significant group, as victims and perpetrators of knife crime—only since January. Police-recorded crime figures included data specifically on knife crime only from July 2008, even though statistics for hospital admissions show that the problem has been escalating for several years.
	The Government have consistently failed, on almost every count, to take opportunities to tackle head on the problem of rising knife crime. Meanwhile, the public debate about tackling knife crime between the Government and the official Opposition still revolves around tougher punishment. We had confirmation of that today. The Conservatives believe that the current system lets people off too lightly and that anyone convicted of possessing a knife should expect a custodial sentence. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) confirmed that in his speech—it was not in the motion. The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has said:
	"If you are carrying a knife and you are caught, you should expect to go to prison. Plain, simple, clear."
	However, the official Opposition have obviously not done their sums. Based on the annual cost of imprisoning somebody, the number of extra prison places that would be needed and the estimated number of new prisoners as a result of the policy, we calculate that they are looking at a cost of £4.9 billion a year. The policy, from a party that has pledged to cut all sorts of taxes in a recession—corporation tax, inheritance tax, VAT, national insurance temporarily, stamp duty—would be the equivalent of adding a penny on the basic rate of income tax. If the official Opposition would not pay for it through a tax rise, will the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell tell us how they would fund it? He is not attempting to rise to provide some explanation.
	Putting the policy's questionable arithmetic aside, it also ignores the evidence that tougher penalties are far less effective as a deterrent than catching more criminals. A Home Office-commissioned study on sentence severity, which leading criminologists conducted, concluded that there is
	"no firm evidence regarding the extent to which raising severities of punishment would enhance deterrence of crime".
	We already lock up more people per head of the population than any other EU country except Luxembourg.
	Knife crime is perpetrated primarily by young men, yet the reoffending rate for a young man serving a first custodial sentence is 92 per cent.

David Davies: I am sure that everyone is getting a sense of déjà vu at such exchanges, but the hon. Gentleman clearly knows that young men serving their first sentence are almost invariably given a short sentence and released less than halfway through it. That is why the reoffending rate is so high. If they were given a meaningful term, they would be much less likely to reoffend.

Christopher Huhne: The hon. Gentleman assumes that if something does not work, it will begin to work if there is twice as much of it. A much more common-sense approach is to assume that, if a short sentence given to a young man leads to a 92 per cent. reoffending rate, it would be better to try alternatives, particularly since short sentences are given for relatively trivial offences. There was one thing that I entirely agreed with in the speech by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, which was his point about the need to head young people off—young men in particular—and stop them getting involved in a life of crime.

Humfrey Malins: I am following the hon. Gentleman's argument about reoffending, but in one way the situation is even worse. The figures vary from age to age, but the statistics show that somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent. of young people on release reoffend, which means that they reoffend up to 4.5 times on average in one year. However, he will realise that, because only about one in seven crimes is detected, that figure probably means that a young man on release will have reoffended up to 30 times in one year, so we are talking about reoffending not just once, but many times.

Christopher Huhne: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that point, which emphasises the need to try alternatives to short custodial sentences—alternatives that do not involve educating young men in skills that we do not want them to acquire, and at an extremely high cost to the taxpayer. That is why I find so unsatisfactory the knee-jerk reaction of those on the Labour and Conservative Benches whenever there is a problem—"Lock them up for longer and throw away the key," which flies in the face of the evidence of what works.

Diane Abbott: More than 25 years ago, I was a career civil servant in the prison department in the Home Office, working on criminal justice policy. Twenty-five years ago, when sentences were longer, the reconviction rates were the same. All things being equal, young people are much more likely to reoffend if they are given a custodial sentence. The experts have known that for a quarter of a century. When are we as politicians going to move away from the knee-jerk reactions of the tabloid press and deal with what works?

Christopher Huhne: I very much agree with the hon. Lady and congratulate her on her excellent sound effects earlier in the debate. I certainly agree that criminalising a generation of young people who have become involved in knife crime, rather than addressing the reason why they become involved—exclusion from school, fear, peer pressure, gang membership, social deprivation and poverty or family breakdown, to name but a few—does the young people of this country a great disservice.
	What we need, in addition to more effective stop and search and the wider implementation of the Cardiff model, is an end to the blanket criminalisation of young people. Of course those convicted of serious and violent crimes need to be dealt with proportionately, but we need to stop young people turning to crime in the first place and help those who stray into it to get back on the right track. Preventive programmes, such as a youth volunteer force, should be created to give kids something to do and to provide skills for later life. There should be more youth facilities to stop the devil making work for idle hands. There should also be more dedicated youth workers in safer neighbourhood teams and an effort by schools not only to identify kids at risk of being sucked into gangs at a young age, but to contact and enrol their parents in the fight to stop that happening.
	For those who are beginning to commit low-level offences, acceptable behaviour contracts and positive behaviour orders should be used, which, unlike antisocial behaviour orders and curfews, require offenders to take responsibility for making amends for their actions without criminalising them unnecessarily. Custodial sentences are of course necessary for serious and serial criminals, but they should be the last resort, not the first.
	That is a major point of difference between us and the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, who talked about the presumption of a custodial sentence for carrying a knife. It is already possible to send someone to jail for four years for carrying a knife, but we cannot punish anyone unless we catch them first. What is needed to tackle knife crime is a lot less posturing about punishments and a lot more catching criminals by using the obvious tools that we have to hand. Labour cannot change its policies and the Conservatives have barely scratched the surface of what needs to be done.

Justine Greening: I am interested in the hon. Gentleman's comment that so little is being done. Presumably he is aware of Operation Blunt Two in London. In the past year, more than 2 million people have been stopped, 10,000 arrests have been made—a rate of one every 51 minutes—and 25,500 knives have been seized. There has been a 30 per cent. fall in serious stabbings, and 90 per cent. of those caught in possession of a knife have been charged. Is that a good performance?

Christopher Huhne: I began my speech, as I hope the hon. Lady recognises, by citing the fact that there has been a fall in knife crime and that the problem is being tackled. I find it distressing, however, that some of the easiest hits on getting knife crime down are being missed, particularly the application of the Cardiff model. We know that that model has reduced the number of people being admitted to hospital with knife wounds by 40 per cent. in the areas in which it has been applied. That is potentially a very dramatic gain, and we ought to be making it a serious, top-rate public priority to ensure that it happens. I do not get a sense of urgency, either today from the new Home Secretary or from his Department and its officials; nor is there an acknowledgement that this is an easy hit that could provide real action very quickly.
	We will support the Opposition motion today because its emphasis is right, but we believe that the Liberal Democrats are the only party that is able to take a targeted and effective approach to knife crime that will really work.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. May I say to the House that as about seven hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye, that suggests a tariff of about 15 minutes? Perhaps each person who is called will bear that in mind.

Keith Vaz: I will certainly bear that in mind, Mr. Deputy Speaker, although I know that your request was not directed only at me. My speeches can be quite brief on occasions of this kind.
	It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne). He and the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) gave evidence to the Select Committee and they can take credit for the recommendations that we made in respect of knife crime. I also want to reiterate my welcome to the Home Secretary. If every debate on Home Affairs issues is as consensual as this one, they will be extremely boring for the public, who expect them to be extremely robust. We will take this one as an exception, however. I perceive in this debate a willingness on the part of all the political parties to work together to ensure that we rise above party politics to find a long-term solution to the problem of knife crime that is affecting this country.
	The motion tabled by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is one that I can gladly vote for. I know that the Government have tabled an amendment to it, but I hope that when the Minister winds up the debate, he will tell us that the Government will not vote against the Conservative motion. It would be good to send a message to the public that on some issues—not all, by any means—we can be united in our hope to deal with a major problem.
	I also want to place on record my appreciation of the work of the previous Home Secretary. It is in the nature of democratic politics that we do not get to say goodbye before people go, even though the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell tried to say goodbye to my right hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith) the last time she was here—

Chris Grayling: She was saying nothing.

Keith Vaz: Indeed.
	In my view, my right hon. Friend was a first-class Home Secretary, certainly as far as the Select Committee was concerned. Whenever we asked her to give evidence to us, she readily did so. She was always available to provide us with information, and I hope that the new Home Secretary will take the same position. I know that the Select Committee is seeking an early meeting with him; we have given him some dates to consider.
	I also want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), formerly a Minister of State at the Home Office. He has now left the Department and gone to one with which, as a former schoolteacher, he has a kinship. He is the son of policeman, so obviously having the job of policing Minister was good for him, but he has now gone off to be the Minister with responsibility for children and schools. I wish him well. He, too, was very willing to work with the Select Committee.
	I welcome the Minister of State, Home Department, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), to his new position. I have known him for many years in the House and I wish him well. He has a tough job. He will find the Select Committee very robust with him. He has just left the Ministry of Justice with the Sonnex case ringing in his ears. As I say, he can expect us to be very strong with him over ensuring that there is a proper joined-up criminal justice system. As someone who has come from the Ministry of Justice, he will understand the need to ensure that it is seamless. I do not blame him for what happened in the Sonnex case, although until last week he was the Minister responsible for probation. We hope that he will keep a close eye on what is happening in the Home Office.
	All Members were right to mention the massive concern among the public and in the media about knife crime. We tend to react to high-profile cases, which is why the Select Committee felt it important to ensure that we did not produce our report too quickly; we wanted to bring together all the stakeholders, including the Opposition parties, the voluntary sector, the Government, the NHS and so forth—so that together we could try to fashion a number of recommendations that would be readily accepted by all political parties.
	I did not intervene when the Home Secretary was presenting statistics, but I do not absolutely share his rosy view that knife crime has disappeared. There are, of course, trends showing that knife crime has reduced, but the headline figures are still very worrying indeed. Knife homicides increased by 26.9 per cent. between 2005 and 2007, and there were a total of 270 knife murders in 2007-08—the highest since the homicide index was invented in 1977. Knives were used in 6 per cent. of the British crime survey's violent incidents in 2007 and in approximately 138,000 robberies, woundings or assaults.
	Although there was a bit of banter about the hospital statistics, the fact is that the number of patients admitted to hospitals after stab wounds rose by 48 per cent. The total number of admissions to A and E—5,239—may seem relatively small, but the percentage increase causes us a great deal of worry. That is why the Select Committee fully accepted the Liberal Democrat viewpoint when the hon. Member for Eastleigh gave evidence: it is no good Manchester producing those figures and Leicester not producing them; they should be readily available to all the agencies that seek to deal with this important matter. Whether or not that amounts to central control, or central diktat, we need those figures if we are to get a clear picture of what is happening.
	It is, of course, the victims about whom we should be primarily concerned. If any criticism of the Select Committee report could be made—and I make it as its Chairman—it is probably that we did not spend enough time talking to the victims. It is in practical terms difficult to do, because there are so many of them, so we concentrated on those who had entered the public domain and the people who were prepared to come and talk to the Committee about their own personal experiences. It is important to highlight the necessity to provide as much information as possible to the victims during the processes of the criminal justice system. If we do that, we will be much stronger in dealing with the overall causes of knife crime.
	What are the causes? I know that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell was not overly taken by our description of an "arms race". He pointed out that the vast majority of young people do not go around carrying knives; only a small proportion carry them, but the damage they do is profound. The Select Committee used the term "arms race" because we thought it an appropriate description of why young people decided to carry knives. A survey conducted by the OCJS—Offending, Crime and Justice Survey—showed that 85 per cent. of knife carriers in 2006 said that they carried their knives for protection. In other words, the only reason why they were carrying knives was that they felt that someone else was doing so, so they must protect themselves.
	That means that there is a real problem with those who are supposed to protect young people: parents, the state—through the police—community services and, indeed, schools. We concluded that those four agencies were primarily responsible for ensuring that young people were protected, and that their failure, either individually or collectively, had led to an increase in the level of knife carrying. Someone who carries a knife and is in a situation of violence is likely to use that knife; that, in my view, is the reason for the problem of knife crime.

Justine Greening: Is not another, perhaps longer-term, problem the fact that such people are growing up with the sense that they are on their own and must fend for themselves in society? The first time they need practical help from others in the community—people in authority, people who may be older than they are—they often find that it is not there, which conveys a very bad message to them. They tell themselves, "I'm going to have to take care of myself."

Keith Vaz: The hon. Lady is absolutely right about the problems that young people encounter when they are on their own and feel isolated. They feel that they have to carry knives because that is the only way in which they can protect themselves.
	Let us think about those four agencies. Parents must ask their children where they are going and what they are doing. I think it was the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), a member of the Select Committee, who raised the issue of parental responsibility. Parents do have that responsibility. My children are aged 14 and 12. I ask them—not as often as I should—where they are and what they are doing, and I ask them to keep in touch with me if they are going out with friends. That is something that all parents need to do.
	As our report states, the Committee found that the majority of knives carried by young people—34 per cent.—were kitchen knives from the family home. We do not expect parents to go around counting the kitchen knives every time their kids go out, but an awareness that the knives may well come from the home should be enough to get them thinking. The report also contains a paragraph on the importance of parents' awareness of what video games their children are watching. I know that I have raised this issue in the House on a number of occasions. We feared that violent DVDs and video games contributed to the problem to some extent, because those who were predisposed to violence would be affected by very violent video games.
	As for the police and other agencies, we believed that the initiatives on which the Government had embarked were important. As we have heard from both the present and the previous Home Secretary, a huge amount of money is involved. We did not feel that the "tackling knife crime" initiative had been around for long enough for us to say definitively whether it had been a success, and I welcome what the Home Secretary has said about the need for a review after a year. I am glad that he is getting all the stakeholders together. We would like to be very much a part of that—or we would like the Home Secretary to be very much a part of what the Select Committee is proposing to do. However, we consider it important for the various initiatives not to be duplicated. We feel that they should follow each other carefully and not be taken in isolation, because otherwise the problem will arise of spending money without knowing precisely what it is being spent on.
	Let me now say something about schools. I am glad that we have been joined by the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell). I believe it was his idea that one of his constituents, Mrs. Ann Oakes-Odger, should give evidence to the Select Committee. She produced some very interesting evidence about work that she had done with Essex police. A short film was made by another organisation, the UNCUT project in Leeds. These are examples of local good practice that should be followed in other parts of the country. We felt that there needed to be early intervention. This has to be done at primary school level; it is too late by the time children go to secondary school. That is why we felt that all year 7 schoolchildren should be asked to participate in an assembly or lesson dealing with the issue of knife crime.
	We received some very impressive evidence of what the police are doing, especially in Scotland. We have to give young people alternatives to violence, and some of the schemes we heard about led to a reduction in knife crime. We were particularly taken by a scheme in Glasgow. As well as being the agency that tries to discover whether young people are carrying knives, the police are the best agency to prevent knife crime. We shall want to return to this issue, because the prevention of knife crime is the most important aspect of any discussion of the wider subject.

Bob Russell: May I put on record the fact that Mrs. Ann Oakes-Odger, whom the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, is dedicated to tackling the curse of knife crime because her son was killed by people wielding knives? She is now devoting her life to ensuring that others do not experience what she had to experience.

Keith Vaz: I am happy to agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I wish to express my gratitude to him for ensuring that Mrs. Ann Oakes-Odger gave evidence to the Committee. It is terrible experiences such as hers and that of the widow of Philip Lawrence that drive people to come forward, because there is nothing they can do to bring their loved ones back but they can put up ideas and fashion thoughts as to how we can proceed. We are very grateful for all the work done by the hon. Members for Monmouth and for Colchester, my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter) and the other Committee members.

Stephen Crabb: rose—

Keith Vaz: Mr. Deputy Speaker, I am now nearing your 15-minute time limit on speeches so I shall conclude shortly, but first I shall allow the hon. Gentleman to intervene.

Stephen Crabb: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. His Committee's report is a very good and important document, and the subject of gangs is one of the most important areas it covers. Does he think that the Committee should return to this area in greater depth, because some of the statistics we have heard in the debate suggest that the growth in knife-related incidents in the last three or four years is a direct result of the increase in gang activity?

Keith Vaz: We certainly will return to this subject. We received evidence from young people—some as young as seven—who were a part of gangs and who said they were being used as caddies to carry knives for older children. The nature of gang culture makes it possible that knife crime will increase even further.

Martin Salter: It has been a pleasure to serve, with colleagues from both sides of the House, on the Select Committee. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, as we recognised in our deliberations, there is a danger of demonising all gangs, and that gangs per se do not lead to an increase in knife crime? Instead, what happens is entirely dependent on the activities of the gang, and on whether a knife has become almost a fashion icon, before moving on to become something much more insidious and dangerous.

Keith Vaz: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to him because the Committee was initially keen to produce a quick study and report on knife crime following a recent spate of knife attacks in London, but he said that the report needed to be much longer and more in-depth, and should examine a wide variety of issues.
	What my hon. Friend says about gang-related violence is right. We are not here to demonise gangs. I am sure that the Scouts would not want to regard themselves as a gang. You may well have been a scout, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was not one, but I know that the hon. Member for Colchester was. The Scouts gave evidence to the Committee, telling us that it is important to provide purposeful activities for young men—and, in the context of the Girl Guides, for young girls—to undertake.
	In conclusion, the top few things that I would like the Government to do—the new Minister may announce all this at the Dispatch Box in his reply; who knows?—are as follows: ensure better data sharing about knife violence at a local level; implement the Select Committee's domestic violence recommendations from 2008; ban violent video games and DVDs in young offender institutions; and provide early intervention. Those are just four of the points that the Committee made in its detailed report.
	I would also like better activities to be provided for young people to ensure that they are engaged in constructive, rather than destructive, activities. The Committee looks forward to the Government's response; we know that we published our report only last week, but I am sure that the Minister will respond within the due time. We will continue this conversation with the Government and we want to continue it with the Opposition too, because only by working together can we have a set of policies to which all stakeholders will be able to sign up. Let us keep the party politics out of this and ensure that the House of Commons is united in dealing with this terrible form of crime.

Humfrey Malins: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) on the way in which he introduced this motion from the Front Bench in a very thoughtful speech. I also thought that the Home Secretary's first foray from the Dispatch Box in his new role was very thoughtful. He is clearly concerned and interested, and he listens to arguments. I look forward to his period as Home Secretary, although I hope it is not as long as perhaps he hopes it will be.
	I also congratulate the Select Committee on Home Affairs, whose report I read with interest. I should say how much I agreed when the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) said, at the end of his contribution, words to the effect that the House should try to unite on some of these difficult issues and put its best constructive views.
	I have spoken about crime and knife crime for what seems like many hours in this Chamber over the past few years. I have spoken in Committee for what seems like many days or many weeks on the same subject; I well remember the Violent Crime Reduction Bill being discussed, day after day, in Committee in 2005, and knife crime featured heavily in our debates. I managed to obtain figures showing that at that time some 60,000 children in our country admitted to carrying a knife, for either defensive or offensive purposes—a truly horrifying statistic.
	I have also spoken in this Chamber about the very real fear that I have seen on the faces of witnesses in court who are forced to relive a moment of terror when a knife was waved at them; it is a truly horrifying experience. All through these years I have wondered what we can do to reduce this awful crime, which puts so much fear into so many people and which blights so many of our inner-city areas. I was, therefore, pleased to see that the motion talks about tackling the problem and about solutions.
	May I be forgiven for putting forward some of my own solutions to the House for a few minutes? They apply not only to knife crime, but to crime in general and to young people in particular—mostly it is young men who carry knives. I shall start with a statistic and ask whether we are getting value for money.
	Let us assume that we put a young man away in Feltham remand centre for carrying a knife. The average cost of a place in a young offenders institution is £32,800 a year—a lot of money.

David Davies: Would my hon. Friend not acknowledge that the net cost to the taxpayer is considerably less than that, because that young man would probably be on benefits anyway?

Humfrey Malins: My hon. Friend makes his own point. Given net and gross costs, maybe so, but I simply remark on the fact that while that young man is in the young offenders institution, it costs the taxpayer £32,800 a year to look after him.

David Davies: Perhaps I did not get the point across. It is obviously not costing the taxpayer that much, because the taxpayer is not paying for him to receive benefits while he is in prison.

Humfrey Malins: Yes, and of course my hon. Friend may say that while the young man is in custody, he is not committing crimes outside. I much look forward to hearing his speech on that point. I merely point out that Government figures show that £32,800 is the average cost. Yet we know that when the young man comes out, he will offend. There is a 70 to 80 per cent. chance of his reoffending four or five times officially, and perhaps 25 to 30 times in fact, in one year. My first question, therefore, is whether we are getting value for money from our young offender custodial estate, and my answer is no.
	Let us go back to the time before that young man was put into the custodial estate. Who is he? Where is he from? What is the problem? I have come to the conclusion that there is a great link between crime and school exclusion, and between school exclusion and literacy. An important inspection report in 2004 told us that 83 per cent. of boys under 18 in custody had been excluded from school, and 50 per cent. had been excluded permanently. Why? It was because they had behaved badly. In my judgment—I believe that others share this view—there is a link with literacy. A young man may fall behind in class and begin to behave badly. He cannot keep up, and his behaviour gets worse. He begins to truant, perhaps partly because of the fear of being called stupid or because of embarrassment. He is behind, he is out of school and he has huge literacy problems.
	Let us step forward a bit. I have done a trawl around a number of young offenders institutions in the past 12 months, and person after person who runs these places tells me that 80 per cent. of their youngsters aged 15 have the literacy and numeracy levels of an eight-year-old. That is not good news. Although it is not a rule right across the board, there is a link between that and the youngster who gets on badly at school and cannot keep up. He starts to behave badly, has very low literacy and numeracy levels, plays truant, gets excluded, gets permanently excluded, goes out and joins a gang, and does not want to go back to school because he is frightened and embarrassed. It starts off with literacy, which is a big problem.
	When I look at our young offenders institutions, I ask, "Well, what are doing about it there? What is actually going on?" Are the youngsters in those institutions getting 20 hours a week of education? No, they are not. Government figures show that at Feltham, they get seven hours' education a week. At Rochester, they get three and a half hours, and at Reading five hours. It is just not enough.

Martin Salter: The hon. Gentleman mentioned Reading and touched on a particular cause of mine, which is the causal link between illiteracy and reoffending. Does he agree that our current reoffending rates are nothing short of a national disgrace? Some 70 per cent. of youngsters on a first-time custodial sentence in young offenders institutions will reoffend within two years. It is utterly ridiculous for the first period of internment to be short and without training.

Humfrey Malins: The consensual atmosphere of this debate comes through again, and the hon. Gentleman makes a valid point.
	What would I want to happen to that young man who entered a young offenders institution aged 15 or 16? First, I would make a thorough assessment of his literacy and numeracy abilities. An individual plan would be drawn up for him. If, as is probable, he had been statemented earlier in his life, the statement would form part of his papers on admission and would be acted on. I would also ensure, if possible, that he had proper literacy and numeracy education for 25 hours a week, and I would make that compulsory for under-16s in custody.
	I am very depressed by Government statistics that tell me that in fact our young man would be locked up for 16 or 17 hours a day out of 24. What kind of a world is this? That means that he is out of his cell for seven hours a day, maximum. How much sport would he play in that time? Never mind pumping weights in the gym for a couple of hours—as has been pointed out, that just makes them stronger and fitter and able to run away faster. Where the devil do team sports come into the picture? I am old-fashioned—I cannot help it—and I believe in team sports. They create self-discipline and teach people to win or lose and to take a knock. I have seen young men playing rugby at Feltham and it has been like a breath of fresh air to see how it improves their characters. Team sport is very good for them, as is pursuing the Duke of Edinburgh awards, but hardly any of that happens in our young offenders institutions. Team sport is a terrific thing to do for a young person and their self-esteem and confidence.

Shona McIsaac: The hon. Gentleman makes some interesting points. In north-east Lincolnshire, some excellent work is being done with young men, in getting them to play football, and with young women, getting them into street dancing. This is being done before they offend. Does he agree that such work should be extended across the country so that we can get people to work co-operatively and make use of their energies before they are ever arrested?

Humfrey Malins: The hon. Lady makes a good point and I support what she says.
	Now I come to a revolutionary idea. I do not think that it is mine—I would be very surprised if it were—and I must have heard it somewhere. In any event, I have written about it and published work on it. I think that sending a young person into custody for anything less than eight months is a total waste of time. I have spoken to many judges about this, and my view is that there is no point in putting a young man into a young offenders institution for anything less than 12 months. If he is in there for only five, six or seven weeks, he lies low, joins a gang, does not do much, comes out and goes straight back where he came from. If the offence is not serious enough to merit 12 months in custody, it should be dealt with in the community. Only in a period of nine to 12 months can we really do some good and turn that young person around.

Paul Holmes: I am pleasantly surprised to say that I agree with every word that the hon. Gentleman says, given our previous exchanges in a debate on drugs and alcohol when we did not agree on everything. Does he agree that if we adopted the policy that short sentences should be served in the community, it would relieve some of the pressure on prisons and we could have more training and education in them? In the last Parliament, the Education and Skills Committee's report on prison education found that all the good intentions in adult and young offender institutions were being destroyed because there were not enough prison officers to take people from cells to training areas, and there were so few hours available it was meaningless.

Humfrey Malins: Another way of saying that is that if young offenders institutions are going to do real good—there is no point in having one if they are not going to do good—they should do good not just for three or four weeks but all the way through a proper-length sentence.
	What about the last three months of the sentence? First, where is the emphasis on resettlement? We should have resettlement wings in all our young offenders institutions into which people who are about to leave them should move. The emphasis should be on preparing them and the outside for when they come out. These wings should get the family, the housing and the job ready and should deal with resettlement. There is just not enough emphasis on resettlement.
	I commend the intensive fostering programme, which takes place in Hampshire, I think. Families take young offenders on remand as an alternative to custody. I would not mind seeing that extended to young offenders who leave custody. If they leave the custody estate and go back into exactly the same circumstances they were in—where the home and the scene are miserable, where there is no job and where there is no education—they have had it. It is as simple as that. There is not a cat in hell's chance that they will stay straight. Where is the huge emphasis that we must have on proper resettlement so that people go back into education, get themselves into a job and, possibly, get themselves away from the communities in which they have lived so far?
	Finally, where are the mentors? Gosh, we should have more mentors in life. I would love to see those in their last three months in a custodial estate for young people being given a permanent mentor who came to see them once a week, tried to help them get a job, filled out their CV and went to interviews with them. We have to make our young offenders institutions places that give a real chance to young people to reform themselves and in every respect to come out better than when they went in. We want them to come out with many more chances than when they went in—chances in education, jobs and hope. Only if we focus on those areas, in my judgment, will we ultimately reduce the incidence of crime among young people and, in particular, the incidence of knife crime.

Shona McIsaac: I appreciate the tone in which the debate has been conducted. It has been very consensual, and that is a refreshing change from some of the partisan debates about crime that we have had in the past, and in which there has been too much point scoring.
	My speech today will not be long. I will focus, in particular, on one recent case, which was briefly mentioned by the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman, and that is the death this week of Claire Wilson in Grimsby. On Sunday afternoon, 21-year-old Claire was walking to work at the Pizza Hut in the centre of Grimsby. She was just doing what people often do. Apparently, she was followed for a short while, and she was stabbed to death in what appears to have been a random attack. Claire lost her life, as did her unborn child—she was seven months pregnant and very excited about the prospect of becoming a mum. Her fiancé, Adam, was also excited.
	That case is one of the saddest that I have had to deal with in my years as an MP. It is so, so senseless and shows the sheer horribleness of knife crime. A young woman has lost her life, and the life of her unborn child could not be saved. Her family, friends and neighbours are devastated. The nature of this crime has affected the entire communities of Grimsby and Cleethorpes. A 53-year-old man has been arrested.
	Knife crime is not confined to young people. Gang culture and the attempt to stop the arms race among young people are very serious issues, but the case that I have cited shows that knife crime is not committed only by the young.

Kelvin Hopkins: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I merely wanted to say that another horrific case happened in my constituency in Luton a year or two back when John Henry, a policeman, was killed. However, from what my hon. Friend has said, it seems that the person involved in the case to which she has referred was not involved in youth gang culture. Instead, he may have been seriously mentally disordered, because—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I think that we are going into dangerous territory here. We cannot have a discussion about a particular case, so I counsel the hon. Lady to keep more to generalities.

Shona McIsaac: I appreciate your advice, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was not about to go into details about that particular case. Now that a person has been charged with the crime, I realise that we have to be very careful about how we discuss the nature—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am grateful to the hon. Lady. I was fearful that she was going to be tempted down the wrong road by the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins).

Diane Abbott: It has happened before.

Shona McIsaac: Yes, it has happened before.
	My constituents are understandably very shocked and saddened by this crime. As I was about to say, it horrifically echoes another case that happened in a nearby constituency. Tina Stevenson was murdered in Hull some four years ago as she walked home from antenatal classes, and my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) mentioned a similar case in his constituency. When we are dealing with knife crime, we have to look beyond young people and take account of the danger posed by other people using knives on our streets.
	People in my community are in a state of shock, and they need to be reassured that the criminal justice system will not let Claire and her family down. Because of this crime, the mood in Grimsby and Cleethorpes is that residents feel that their towns have become lawless. They also feel that they cannot go out: the randomness of the attack means that everyone is more fearful of becoming a victim of crime. That has wiped out a lot of the good work that the police have done in tackling volume crime and antisocial behaviour. Sadly, it has wound the clock back on people's fear of crime, which is often out of kilter with the likelihood of their becoming a victim.
	I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson) is the Minister of State who is here listening to the debate, as he is familiar with the justice system. There is certainly a mood among people at the moment that sentences for knife crimes are far too low. I realise that progress has been made, but people certainly feel that knife crimes are not taken seriously enough.
	I want to talk now about a couple of other things, namely the gang culture and young men. I intervened on the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) earlier because it is right to say that far too many of the young men who get sucked into gang culture or who end up in young offender institutions and subsequently prison have atrociously poor literacy and numeracy skills. Because persistent young offenders tend to be given lots of short sentences, we never seem to address their lack of those skills as well as we should.
	I know that people want to do more in that regard, but too often it appears that the problem is not addressed and the result is that people coming out of young offender institutions cannot get jobs. The economic climate is not good for anyone, but least of all for people with very poor literacy and numeracy skills. If we are to tackle knife crime at all levels, we must tackle the educational attainment of people in our criminal justice system, particularly young men.
	In North East Lincolnshire some phenomenal work is being done by the police with vulnerable young people, such as fair play football, as they call it, for the boys. Points are awarded not just for scoring goals, but if, after a tackle, the players shake hands and make up. That does not sound much, but the sense of fair play, respect for others and working collectively in a team is important in trying to break cycles that have persisted for some time in many of our inner-city communities. The girls are not being ignored. They have been doing dance classes. The work is having a powerful effect on the young people in our area.
	It is not just the police who are engaged in such work. One of the neighbourhood watches near where I live has been working with young people in one of the more deprived communities in Cleethorpes. With the young lads, they have been using sports such as football and many other activities to try to break the attraction of gang culture. The desire to belong, which is typical of many young men, makes them want to be part of a gang and leads to many territorial disputes.
	The challenge is to make young people feel that they belong to the community in which they live. Some youngsters get the sense from adults that the young people are committing all the antisocial behaviour, so they almost feel rejected by their own community and are seen as bad lads, for example. Adults adopting an inclusive approach towards the young people in their community, which they probably have not always done in the past, is having a powerful effect on those young people.
	If any Minister could come up and see examples of such work, I would very much appreciate it. Grimsby-Cleethorpes on the east coast of Britain is a bit of a hike to get to, but some powerful work is being undertaken by the police, neighbourhood watch and voluntary groups to do their best to tackle antisocial behaviour and deal with persistent young offenders.
	That is why the loss of Claire in the murder earlier this week is doubly sad. People feel that all that good work has been wiped out and has not had an effect. The communities know that the work is happening, but there is a sense that the town has become lawless. If there is one comment that has been made to me over the past few days, it is, "What on earth has our town come to?" It is very sad that people have had to say that. I hope we get justice for Claire and her family, but our whole community has suffered.

Justine Greening: I shall be brief, as I know that many other Members want to speak. I am a south-west London MP, and knife crime is an issue that we have felt acutely on our side of the river. Many of us recognise that the problem has been building up for years. Since 2005 it has become more prominent in the press, but that reflects the tip of an iceberg of general youth-on-youth crime. That is the aspect that I shall speak about. It has a much broader impact than we see in the newspapers, where only the unfortunate fatal cases are reported.
	A couple of trends have led over recent years to the current situation. First, there is technology. Crime has moved out of the home and on to the street in the past 10 years, so there is now less and less point in breaking into somebody's house to try to lug their plasma TV down the road unnoticed when they have a burglar alarm and all sorts of protection for their property; it is far more effective to steal somebody's iPod, expensive mobile phone or all the portable kit and possessions that people have on them in the street. The people with those possessions are far more likely to be young, and now they end up on the front line of crime in a way that they simply did not 10 or 20 years ago.
	Secondly, there is the rise of gangs and the longer-term, associated issues of family breakdown and housing overcrowding, which mean that our young people are out on the streets socialising with one another, when, 10 or 20 years ago, they might have returned to their homes and been up in a bedroom on their own or with a smaller group of friends. We see children socialising in larger groups more now than we ever did. Often, their parents are working, so they are not around to provide as much supervision as I am sure many of them would want to.
	We have heard the underlying statistics that go beyond the fatal knife crime statistics that we read about in the papers and hear about in our constituencies from our constituents. The hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) set out the statistics on A and E admissions for knife wounds, serious knife wounds and emergencies, and they are staggering. There was a large jump in 2005-06 and the numbers rose in the intervening couple of years, but they have now reached a plateau. Clearly, we are now dealing with an ongoing knife crime problem that will be very stubborn and difficult to reduce in the long term. Nevertheless, we need to do so. I take the point that the hon. Gentleman and other Members made about how we need better to understand and share data about knife possession—whether on knife wounds, from people who turn up at A and E or in schools and in youth provision, when different community stakeholders pick up information about the possession and prevalence of knives among our young people.
	I challenge the Minister to refer in his response to the British Crime Survey, which still does not talk to people under 16-years-old. We have seen the rise in the number of younger victims of crime in Britain over the past few years, and the problem goes back to the fact that street crime is focused on young people so much more than it used to be.
	I want to talk about a way through, however. A huge amount of work is going on not just in London but throughout Britain, and there are huge opportunities for young people, meaning that they do not necessarily have to go down the route of crime. It is worth saying that, overwhelmingly, most young people will not get involved in crime but will contribute huge amounts to their communities. On Friday night, I was at the Putney division of the Wandsworth sea cadets, who were having a great time and learning brilliant life skills. I can point to another project in my constituency, the Regenerate project on the Alton estate, which directly tackles youngsters who are more likely to get into crime and knife crime. That is an entirely different project, dealing with different youngsters, but again it is doing fantastic work.
	There is a way through the problem, and it involves us all working together. We must agree that, in the short term, initiatives such as Operation Blunt Two in London, are absolutely critical to addressing today's problem. However, my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) talked about the fact that, in the medium term, we need to understand the individual issues that lead people down such paths. In my view, the problem is not caused just by learning difficulties, although that is a big part; much of the problem is caused by aspiration and what young people in some parts of our communities see as success and the route to success. For too many, success in the area where they grow up means climbing the gang hierarchy and being seen to make progress on that route, rather than going into business or being successful in different walks of life. We must ensure that, for our children, wherever they grow up, there are many more visible pathways to success and its acknowledgment.
	If there is one idea that we should consider as a community, not just in my constituency, but throughout London and throughout Britain, it is the idea of more volunteering by men. They can be role models for the younger male adults growing up in our communities. Perversely, 80 per cent. of volunteers in Britain are women, but never has there been more need for more men to come forward—whether for the Scouts or for charities such as Regenerate in Roehampton. Male volunteers can give young men, in particular, the benefit of their experience and a sense that one can achieve many more positive outcomes in life by contributing positively in our society and as part of our community than one can by simply climbing the gang hierarchy and leading a parallel life to that which so many other people lead. If we as a House work together and continue to debate these issues constructively, we will achieve something that will be extremely valuable not just to our children growing up today, but, I hope, to their children in the future.

Diane Abbott: I am very glad to be able to take part in this important debate, and I congratulate the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), on the excellent report that he has helped to bring to gestation. I am sure that it will fashion and inform our debate for a long time to come.
	It is important in such a debate first to stress that the majority of our young people are not caught up in knife crime, gun crime or gang culture. It is easy to get carried away and criminalise young people as a class, inner-city young people as a class and, even, young people of a certain skin shade as a class. I might shock the House to say that one might walk through Hackney and see a group of gangling boys lurking under their hoods and think that they are plotting murder and mayhem, but they might just as well be on their way to play basketball. They will be quite pleased that people are frightened of them, but they will be trotting behind their mother to church on a Sunday. The media encourage us to jump to conclusions about young people, but we should not, so I want to put it on record that, although we have our issues in Hackney, the majority of our young people are not in that criminal sub-culture.
	I do not know of many young inner-city men who when shopping up the west end have not been descended on by store detectives, or who have not walked down a street and had women clutch their bags closer to their bodies because they have just assumed that such men are criminals. We have to beware of criminalising our young people in that way. None the less, as a Member for an inner-city area and as a parent, I know that knife crime and the related issues of guns and gangs are very frightening to parents and communities, not least because one can say goodbye to one's child as they go off in the morning to school, college or their first job, and by the evening receive a phone call saying that they have been caught up in an incident—sometimes quite innocently. That is a frightening thing for parents in an inner-city area to live with, because when the gun, gang and knife cultures erupt, they often touch and harm young people who are simply going about their business.
	I want to talk about the long-term issues of knife crime, the medium-term things that we as the Government and society can do, and the short-term response that we need from the criminal justice system. Where does the young man, swaggering around an estate with a knife up his sleeve, thinking that he can demand respect with the point of a blade or a gun, come from? I do not believe that he is the result of listening to music or watching video games. I do not believe that the culture produces criminal behaviour; I believe that the criminal sub-culture produces the music and the games.
	Where do such young men come from? They come from families, many thousands of them on estates that I represent in Hackney, where young boys are growing up not just in female-headed households—I would be the last person to say that a single parent cannot be a good parent—but in households where they have never seen men getting up and going out to work, and meeting their responsibilities as men; nor have their friends seen that. When they go to school, most of their teachers are women. As they grow up, their notion of manhood is a vacuum. I was fortunate; my family are working-class Jamaicans, but every day that God sent, my father went out to work, and on a Friday he brought home his wage packet. That was my notion, and my brother's notion, of what being a man was all about.
	There are too many young children on estates in Hackney who do not have a notion of manhood. They do not see people—men or women—going out to work and meeting their responsibilities. As they grow up, their minds are filled with a notion of manhood that is informed partly by popular culture, yes, but partly also by the guys they see on the street with the big cars and the gold chains. They do not know that those guys will have a very short "working" life. They do not know about the downside. All that they see is the swagger, the big car, the gold chains, and the notion that that guy is the one whom all the girls are after. Into those boys' imagination comes a notion of manhood that I do not recognise, that people in the House do not recognise, and that my father would not have recognised. That is the notion of manhood to which those boys aspire.

Justine Greening: The hon. Lady makes a really good point. Often, when such people see role models, they are celebrities; they are out of reach. They need to see role models who are within reach, and who have realistic lives that they can achieve and aspire to.

Diane Abbott: That is right. The notion of role models is often misused. It is not a question of pulling in people from outside a community and saying, "Look, you can be him." Young people should be able to see people who are recognisably like them, and recognisably part of their lives—people who are leading the sort of lives that, a few generations ago, inner-city communities took for granted.
	As I say, the process starts in the home. When the children I am talking about go to school, increasingly teachers are finding that some of them have not been spoken to. That is a curious thing. When I was growing up in the working-class West Indian community, the one thing that a person could never complain about is people not talking to them; people talked to us the whole time. However, in some of the communities that I am talking about the mothers are watching television or listening to their iPods. When such children attend school for the first time, valuable time is lost just socialising them—teaching them how to use a knife and fork, and how to work co-operatively. That is at the heart of some of the educational failure that we see further down the line.
	I believe that the long-term origins of the social dislocation that leads to gangs, guns and knives is in the home. That dislocation starts with young women who, although they may love their children, do not know how to parent them. Their idea of parenting them is having them dressed up in designer clothes from top to toe. When my son was at primary school, he was constantly complaining that the other little children had a lot of expensive designer stuff. Their mothers were on benefit; I was a Member of Parliament. He could not understand why he could not be in designer clothes, but that was the limit of those girls' notion of parenthood.
	In the summer holidays, when I took my bus pass—I am not a driver—and took my son to reading schemes in the library, or youth projects in museums, or whatever a person could take a little child to on a bus, I would often find that I was the only ethnic minority parent there. It is not that other minority parents in Hackney do not care for their children, but their notions of being a parent are limited. They perhaps come from cultures where the child would have been brought up collectively by aunties and grannies. Instead, they are isolated on some estate, and the aunties and grannies are not within reach. The parents are thrown back on to their own knowledge, which is limited.
	I take the view, I am afraid, that my Government's emphasis on putting single-parent mothers out to work is wrong. Some of those single-parent mothers need first to be taught to be decent parents. Once they have been taught to be decent parents who are at home when their children come home from school, it will be time to talk about sending them out to work to stack shelves.
	I have set out some of the issues relating to home life that I believe form some of the rootless, valueless young men who grow up to be involved in gangs and knives. The answer to those problems is long-term; there is no question about that. We have to look at our policies on work, and look at how we support parents. We have to look at how we work with the Churches. I admit that I am not a regular church-goer myself, but often the only bastion of order, values and boundaries in inner-city areas is the Church.
	I have set out the sort of home life that some of the young men in question have. Having said that, I can show hon. Members families in Hackney in which one young man will tread the straight and narrow and be a credit to his family, and another will be in gangs. For three years I have run an awards programme for top-achieving black children in London. I remember that in the first year we gave an award to a young boy from Somalia who had been brought up on the Chalk Hill estate, one of the toughest estates in Brent. He had been to state schools, but on leaving state school he was able to go to the university of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and graduated with a first. His brother was a gang member. Having said what I said about home conditions, individuals are individuals, and we should always account for that. I have mentioned family dislocation. We are talking about cultures where, generations ago, children had been brought up by an extended family network, but people now find themselves isolated on estates without that support.
	I want to move on to some of the medium-term issues, and I want particularly to focus on education. I was struck by something that a past director general of the Prison Service said: on the day that we permanently exclude a boy from school, we might as well give him a date and time to turn up in prison. I am not saying that educational failure is an excuse for criminality. I am saying that the statistics show a clear link between educational failure and exclusion on the one hand, and criminality on the other. It stands to reason that a boy who is in class studying for his AS-levels is not wandering up and down estates in Hackney doing what he should not be doing.
	I have paid a lot of attention to and spent a lot of time on issues of educational failure, and I believe that we have to focus on particular communities in a laser-like way. The danger with some of our education programmes in the inner city is that it is children from the more motivated families—often quite middle-class families—who get on the "gifted and talented" schemes. Quite gifted, intelligent, talented boys get pulled in another direction. Let us remember, some of the boys in gangs may do dreadful things, but they have tremendous qualities of leadership and tremendous skills, and often have tremendous ability. The problem is that we are not intervening early enough to direct that energy and charisma and those leadership skills in the right direction.
	For more than a decade I have organised a conference on education; it is called "London Schools and the Black Child". Every year, I get 1,500 black parents and teachers to talk about the issues facing our children. Hon. Members should never believe that inner-city parents are not concerned about their children; they are concerned. There is more that we can do to tap that concern and encourage them to understand that the school system is on their side.
	As I have said, I also run an award scheme, and the House would be amazed to see the children from some of the toughest estates in London—black children from state schools—who get 10 As at GCSE, and four As at A-level, and who study medicine and go to Russell group universities. As I said right at the beginning of my contribution, knife crime and gangs are a terrible problem, but we should never forget how many of our young people—young black and Asian people—even in the inner cities achieve extraordinary things in the face of adverse circumstances.
	I believe that education is key, but this is a home affairs debate. However, I could say more about the need for a teaching work force in London who look like London; the need to recruit more black teachers; the need for more male teachers at primary school level; and the need to target different groups quite specifically, which I mentioned. It is no good talking about ethnic minority children. The needs and the results of a Chinese child who lives above a takeaway, a third-generation West Indian child, a first-generation African child, and a middle-class east African child are very different. Those children perform very differently academically, so I believe in targeted intervention and education.
	Finally, I want to talk about the criminal justice response to issues of knife crime. Some Members have mentioned the importance of longer sentences, but what deters the young people involved is the certainty of being caught. The focus on sentencing is a problem as we try to fight against the gangs, guns and knives. It makes the public feel good—"Put them inside and throw away the key. Give them 10 or 20 years." However, the point is not the length of the sentence, but the certainty of being caught.

John Leech: I thank the hon. Lady for giving way, and I agree with what she has said. The all-party group on child and youth crime, of which I am a member, is looking into knife crime at the moment. When we spoke to young people, they said to us that it did not matter what sentence they got if they were caught. They felt that they had to carry a knife because they felt safer. The fact that they were then more likely to be the victim of knife crime was irrelevant; they felt safe carrying a knife. Whether the sentence was one year or 20 years made no difference to them. The issue was all about whether or not they felt safe.

Diane Abbott: I agree entirely with that intervention.
	I shall draw my remarks to a close. The inter-agency working under Operation Blunt, and its capacity to intervene early, has been important. The use of knife arches and other such measures is also important. Knife crime may involve only a minority of our children, but it strikes fear into the hearts of communities and parents. Education is significant. It is a fallacy that carrying a knife makes someone safer; in fact, it puts them more at risk. We do not need to educate only young people; too many parents allow their children to take knives from home to "defend themselves". The answers are multi-agency working and more education—and, where necessary, measures such as knife arches and targeted stop and search. Those measures are important.
	It is wrong to stigmatise a whole class, generation and cohort of young people. However, knife crime is a serious issue and we have to consider the short-term criminal justice measures. It is important for us to do more to protect witnesses and to make it easier for them to be anonymous if they need to be. Recently, I had a meeting with the Secretary of State for Justice about possible changes to the court process to make it easier to ensure that when gang members are caught, they go down. There is no more important disincentive to a gang member than the notion that they will actually go down; the issue is not about the length of the sentence. Criminal justice measures can be taken.
	We have had successes as a Government, but knife crime is emblematic of what has gone wrong for a generation of our young people. I do not want to sensationalise the issue, as some of our media do, but nor do I want to underplay it. The Government have done good work, but there is more to be done—particularly, as I have said, in considering the long-term social context of the problem.

Stephen Crabb: I am grateful for the opportunity to participate for a few short minutes in this extremely important debate. I commend not only my colleagues on the Front Bench for pressing for it, but all Members who have participated for the tone in which it has been conducted. We have had an extremely useful and constructive discussion about an extremely important issue.
	Several Members have already commented on the consensual tone of the debate so far, but the public expect nothing less from us—they are crying out for action on and solutions to this extremely difficult problem. They are sickened and appalled every time they read in the newspapers or see on television reports of the murder of another teenager on the streets of London or of other cities and towns across the UK. That is why they take to the streets and march for action, as we saw last June in London. In September there were more marches in London and in Gourock, near Glasgow in Strathclyde. Members of the public have taken to the streets to campaign on the issue and say that enough is enough. They do not want to live in communities blighted by fear or scarred by street violence. They want to see us in Parliament taking action that will prove effective in the long term.
	I should like to make a few brief points. The first relates to the nationwide nature of the problem. Yes, it is true that knife crime is overwhelmingly concentrated in certain urban centres, but the problem is also experienced in many communities that have not traditionally had such crime on their streets. I am thinking particularly of my own community in Pembrokeshire, in rural west Wales. In November 2006, a fine young man—an excellent soldier from the local 14th Signal Regiment—was stabbed to death outside a nightclub in Haverfordwest, in the heart of Pembrokeshire. The community was truly shocked because people have not been used to such crime. It is true that it was a one-off which has not been repeated, but it created enormous shock in the community.
	Such an incident encourages a ratchet effect. I do not like the phrase "arms race", which has been mentioned this afternoon, but when young people are seen to start carrying and using knives, fear is created in the community and other young people feel that they have to arm themselves as well if they are to be able to respond to any threats. When knife crime starts to spread out from urban centres and hits communities such as mine in rural west Wales, there is a risk that other young people will be encouraged to become involved.
	My second point relates to young women. Yes, the typical carrier of a knife is a young male aged between 15 and 19 living in an urban area, but an increasing number of young women are using and carrying knives and being drawn into gang culture. I saw that for myself when, three years ago, I visited Eastwood Park women's prison with the Welsh Affairs Committee. There I met a young woman who was serving a sentence for taking someone's life by using a knife. The knife crime problem overwhelmingly involves young males, but we should not allow the stereotype to prevent us from looking at all aspects of the problem and recognising that young women are drawn in as well. Such young women have often been victims of horrendous abuse in their earlier lives, and when they get sucked into gang culture they find themselves becoming victims of abuse again.
	My third point is about statistics, which have been discussed this afternoon. The Home Affairs Committee report recognises that we still lack data robust enough to enable us to understand the true scale of knife-related crime. There is a paucity of good data about the activity of gangs around the country. If we are to have effective, local solutions, we need better data to be collected by the police, other agencies and third sector organisations that work at the coal face.
	Finally, I should like to draw to the attention of my party's Front Benchers and the Minister a report entitled "Dying to belong", which was published recently by the Centre for Social Justice. It is the best survey of the problems of gang crime that I have come across. It was produced by a Centre for Social Justice working group, chaired by Simon Antrobus, chief executive of Clubs for Young People. The working group comprised people from Nacro, academics studying the problem and people working at the coal face. The quality of the group's research on the nature of gang-related crime and possible effective solutions is very high, and I commend the report—along with the Home Affairs Committee report—to the House.

David Davies: It has been a pleasure to listen to the debate. I am sorry that the House is so empty at the moment, because the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) made, without doubt, the best speech of the afternoon; indeed, it was one of the best speeches that I have heard in this place. I am not just saying that. I disagree with some of what she said, and she will disagree with some of what I am going to say—but she knows what she is talking about, this lady. Before she leaves, I want, if I may, to invite myself to talk to her again about these issues, because I am going to mention one of the areas that she talked about—not in her constituency—which I have also visited. She may know that I have worked for some years as a special constable. I have arrested people not only for carrying knives, but more seriously—and, I am thankful to say, more rarely—for carrying guns. I have enjoyed working with her colleague, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), who has chaired the Home Affairs Committee in a non-partisan way that is reflected in this debate.
	Over the past six months I have visited some of the areas in question myself—not dressed as I am now, but wearing a tracksuit, an old pair of trainers and a T-shirt—to try to get a sense of how it feels to live in them and whether the perception of crime is matched by the reality. I am glad to say that I am still here; I was certainly not attacked. However, in at least two of the four more notorious areas of London, I felt very threatened and intimidated by what was going on. I saw groups of young people like those that the hon. Lady mentioned congregating at the side of the road. I watched them going silent and looking at me when I went past, and I kept my eyes to the ground and kept walking in a straight line as though I knew where I was going, which in some cases I did not. Frankly—I am sorry to have to say this—my thought on returning from one of those visits was, "Thank God I don't live in that area and my children don't go to school there." That is just being honest.

Diane Abbott: I see the same groups on my way home, as I live in my constituency. I would say this to the hon. Gentleman: if you were a middle-aged black woman and looked them straight in the eye, you might find that they took a step backwards.

David Davies: If the hon. Lady looked me straight in the eye in a venomous way, I would probably take a step backwards as well.
	Is it the reality that crime is high in these areas, or is it a perception? I do not know, but the numbers of people found carrying knives indicates that there is a serious problem. People have told me about the trainers hung from lamp posts to mark out gang territory, although I did not see that myself. In one community centre, they told me that people were being delivered to the area by car because they were afraid not only to walk but even to use public transport into another postcode district. I am happy to give the hon. Lady exact details about that. There is no doubt that there is a perception among law-abiding people living in those areas that there is a real problem, and the question is: what can we and should we be doing about it?
	The hon. Lady talked about her upbringing in what I think she described as a traditional working-class household. I was brought up in a conventional middle-class household, but I recognise most of the values that she talked about because they are the same: bringing up children to say please and thank you, teaching them to eat with a knife and fork, and getting them to understand the importance of education and doing what they are told at school. Those values are universal. My upbringing was conventional and middle class, but that is not the case with many of my family. My mother was a miner's daughter. I remember going into miners welfare institutes, where one would see great books; they would have whole libraries there. What happened to those traditional working-class values of betterment and education, whereby people could go into a miners welfare institute and not just have a couple of pints but read quite intellectual books? That sort of thing seems to have died out somewhere along the way. The problem in many of these areas is not particularly one of deprivation or poverty. One of the problems is the development of an under-class of people who do not seem to share the same values that are universal to so many of us in this Chamber.

Stephen Crabb: My hon. Friend is making an important point. I do not think there is a difference between working-class values and middle-class values. It is not the values that have declined, but the vehicle for transmitting them to young people, which is essentially the family unit: that is where the problem lies.

David Davies: I agree with my hon. Friend. What I detect in these areas is an irresponsible approach towards family. Far too often, young people think that it is okay to bring children into this world without considering the implications. I am certainly not talking about single mothers, or women in particular—it takes two to tango—or about people who get divorced or whose partners die, or who become pregnant by mistake, which can happen as well. I am talking about people who have no concept of the problems caused by having two, three, four or five children when they are still in their early 20s. Those of us who are parents, as virtually all of us here are, know how difficult it is to bring up children at the best of times.
	Walking around those areas, I saw another problem—although the hon. Lady may disagree with this. It was fairly obvious that many of the people living there had probably arrived in the country relatively recently and had not yet integrated. I am not necessarily talking about people who are black or Asian, but just as much about people from eastern Europe. My wife is from eastern Europe, so that is in no way meant to be derogatory. There is a problem when large groups of people who have come from a variety of racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds are all dumped into one particular area, cheek by jowl, without any attempt to integrate them.

Diane Abbott: The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. However, I have paid a lot of attention to black boys' educational achievement, and he might be surprised to know that newly arrived African immigrants' boys do significantly better than West Indian boys whose families have been in this country for generations. Time does not allow me to explain why that is.

David Davies: I recognise that. I am also aware that black boys from Barbados seem to do much better than those from Jamaica. It is a complicated issue. That makes me wonder whether the question of family structures and strong family values is not more important. My wife is the daughter of an east European farm labourer. She was brought up on an estate of grim tower blocks in southern Hungary—her parents still live on it—but walking around there one sees no problems whatsoever. In that part of the world there are strong family structures and a strong sense of community and homogeneity, so there are not problems of the sort that we see in some parts of inner-city London. I am struggling to find the answers, but I do not think that the problem is one of poverty: the lack of social cohesion is part of it, as is the lack of family structures.
	We have heard about role models. Why is it that all too often, black youth growing up have as a role model somebody they have seen on MTV driving around in a fast expensive car? What happened to the black role models who run churches and youth groups? Why are they not looking up to people like that?
	These are important questions, and they will not be answered today; it will take many decades to sort them out. However, there are things that we could be doing, and the Home Affairs Committee report has drawn attention to a few of them. We heard earlier from Liberal Democrat Members that one of the greatest disincentives to carrying a knife is the fear of being caught. That makes me wonder why they, more than anyone else, have opposed measures to allow the police to stop and search young people in areas where there is a particular problem.
	The Government—for all that I criticise them, quite rightly on many occasions—have been trying their utmost to tackle this problem. They have been moving in the right direction, but there is more that they could do. For example, it is ludicrous that if the police stop somebody for carrying out a minor offence that will not lead to an arrest, and they discover, or already know, that that person has recent convictions or a propensity to carry knives, they cannot immediately carry out a simple stop and search because they must have the evidence that the person has a knife on them at that moment, which they will not have unless someone has seen it, or can see the handle sticking out of the person's pocket. That situation is ludicrous, and I hope that the Government will think about changing it. However, they have made it easier to bring in section 60 orders, which allow stop and search to be carried out.
	It was suggested earlier that a young person who is excluded from school might as well be told when they can turn up to prison. I do not accept that. There are good projects taking place in the inner cities: for example, the London boxing academy in Haringey, which young people who have been excluded from school are strongly encouraged to join. When they are in that placement, they get a couple of hours of sport every day, as well as learning. They are taught by qualified teachers and have mentors who are former boxers and can therefore maintain a sense of discipline that might be lacking in other places. The pilot project has been successful; we could do with many more such projects in inner cities to reach people before they get as far as prison or a young offenders institution.
	I agree with most hon. Members that short sentences are a waste of time. They carry no incentive to behave and, as others have pointed out, little is done with people who go to prison or a young offenders institution for a short time. A Faustian pact seems to be made, whereby the prison officers allow offenders to have a relatively comfortable time, provided that the offenders give the officers no trouble. That is simply not good enough. We must get people into a routine in which they get exercise, education—basic literacy and numeracy—and basic vocational skills. That cannot be done in a short time—it takes at least one or two years. Instead of saying, "Let's not put people in prison if it's going to be for a short time; let's give them community sentences instead," we should say, "We've got people here who have transgressed, and who will go on transgressing. Put them in prison, by all means—but not into a prison that's just a Victorian cage with an iron door and bars on the windows." They should not be left in such places, but, once the punishment element of their sentence has been served—if the offence is minor, perhaps that element is not needed—they should be put into a college surrounded by walls. Rather than roaming the streets, they should be forced to learn and get the basic numeracy and literacy skills that they need, and we should tell them that they will not be allowed out until they have got those skills, but that they can come out much earlier if they do acquire them.

Keith Vaz: I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his work on the report. He is picking up a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) made. Prison does not always work—the Minister of State, Home Department, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), is, of course, a former prisons Minister—and we must consider alternatives because the reoffending rate is so high. The hon. Gentleman is basically saying, "Incarcerate"—that is, punish—"but make sure that people use their time productively so that they don't come out and reoffend."

David Davies: That is exactly what I am saying. I do not believe that community sentences work, having seen them in action. Even when I went to see such a scheme as a Member of Parliament, no semblance of order could be maintained. At the scheme I visited in Gwent, people were cursing and swearing at the leaders in front of me. I remember one young offender turning round to one of the people supposedly keeping order and demanding, in language I will not use, "Where are my blinking chips?" He had not had his fish and chips, and she went off and got them for him because he did not want to queue. That is what goes on in a community sentencing scheme.

Christopher Huhne: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

David Davies: Yes, I am happy to give way, though the hon. Gentleman had plenty of time earlier.

Christopher Huhne: I was tempted to intervene earlier, when the hon. Gentleman traduced Liberal Democrat policy on stop and search. However, it is obvious that community sentencing will not be effective unless it is properly supervised, and we need a probation service that does that. Surely that is a more sensible way of spending taxpayers' money than short-term custodial sentences. There seems to be general agreement between hon. Members of all parties that they are ineffective, lead to high reoffending rates and can be counter-productive if those serving them learn skills that we do not want them to have.

David Davies: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would be right if people were able to keep order on such schemes, but they are not. People never will be able to do that, because of all the human rights legislation and so on. When we talk to people who run those schemes, we hear about those who do not want to do community service because it is raining and they will get wet, and those who do not want to wear their orange tabards because they feel that it is against their human rights. There is no one in the probation service who is prepared to lay down the law and say, "You will go out there and do this; otherwise you're going straight back to prison." When we talk to those young people, we find that they do not want to go to prison. Prison is seen as much worse than community sentences. Defence barristers never say, "M'lud, please don't give him a community sentence, it'll be far too tough—please send my client to prison instead." When defence briefs start making such pleas, I will start believing that community sentences are a worthwhile deterrent.
	Earlier, the hon. Gentleman said that catching people was the best incentive. One reason for the police's inability to catch people is that the criminals are all out on the streets. If we took some of the worst ones off the streets and kept them in prison for a while, the police could start concentrating on the rest. Resources are currently spread too thinly.

Christopher Huhne: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

David Davies: I will not, because I was told to speak for only 15 minutes.
	I have heard more common sense from Labour Members than I expected, though the Government could do much more. I heard the Minister, in a previous role, speaking on "Analysis" on Radio 4. He spoke well and the BBC did not do him justice in that programme, because it did not accept the point about the worthiness of prison.
	I look forward to working with the Home Secretary—although I do not know how long he will be Home Secretary; the public may have other ideas shortly, as he may. He may apply for a new job in Government. However, I will work with anyone who wants to tackle the menace of crime. I particularly hope that the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington will allow some of us who have an interest to take up her offer of seeing what is happening in her constituency because we could all learn a lot from her.

James Brokenshire: I welcome the Home Secretary to his new position—I am sorry that he is not here to hear that—and the consensual approach that he took to the Opposition motion by tabling an addendum to it rather than trying to amend it or strike it out. That emphasises the need to come together to look for common solutions to a problem that affects so many of our communities throughout the country.
	I also welcome the new Minister of State, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), to his post. He and I have debated similar issues previously, albeit in the TV or radio studios. I therefore look forward to robust and detailed debate across the Dispatch Box so that we can ascertain where there is common ground and where there is difference between us.
	I also send my best wishes to the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker). I will miss our exchanges. Despite our differences, he always showed passion and genuine personal commitment to the important matters that we are considering. I wish him well in his new post in the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
	The scourge of knife crime has touched too many families and communities across the country. In 2007-08, some 270 people were stabbed to death with a sharp or pointed instrument. As we have heard, that is the highest total since records on homicide started to be collected in 1977. It is important to note that the proportion of homicides in which a knife is used has risen to more than a third of all homicides. The Home Affairs Committee's report made that point.
	Sir Igor Judge, the president of the High Court Queen's bench, made a clear and powerful statement on the current disturbing situation last year when he noted:
	"Offences of this kind have recently escalated. They are reaching epidemic proportions. Every knife or weapon carried on the street represents a danger and, therefore, in the public interest, this crime must be confronted and stopped."
	The costs are not simply social and personal. The youth organisation, Kids Count, estimates that knife crime costs the state approximately £1.25 billion a year. I commend Kids Count for its work in giving young people a voice and for its awards, which recognise inspiration, good practice and good organisations that do tremendous work at the coal face.
	When one talks to people who have been directly affected by the appalling incidents, one is humbled by the strength of character and resolve of so many of those who have lost loved ones. Their determination to ensure that some good should come out of the appalling tragedies that they have suffered and that long-term change should be achieved to prevent more lives from being cut short is powerful. We all have a duty in this House to make good on those families' expectations, for the benefit of society as a whole and the next generation in particular.
	This has been a well-informed, wide-ranging and interesting debate. The tone of this debate and the manner in which it has been conducted reflects well on this House, which has come in for a lot of criticism for the way in which we debate such issues. However, today's debate highlights the House at its best. Now that he is in his place again, I commend the Home Secretary for his initial comments and for the constructive way in which he has sought to engage with the debate and set out some of his initial thoughts on how he will approach the issues.
	It will be interesting for Conservative Members to see how the Home Secretary's thoughts develop and, in particular, how he intends to take forward programmes such as the youth crime action plan. How will it be delivered and what responsibilities will it be given? At the moment, various different agencies, organisations and Departments are involved in the project, but if it is to have an effect, its implementation will need to be pushed hard. We will look closely at how that works, how developments such as the safer schools partnerships, which we think are valuable and important ideas, are pursued and how the Home Secretary deals with some of the points that have rightly been raised about the sharing of data and information to ensure that more informed, effective and targeted approaches are taken to deal with the offences being committed.
	I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) and his Committee for producing an extremely good report, which provides a framework for this afternoon's deliberations. He raised a number of extremely important points about the need for long-term solutions. Some short-term wins may have been highlighted—the use of stop and search, Operation Blunt Two here in London and the work of the Mayor of London—but I am under no illusions. The problem appears to be persistent, and, although some short-term benefits may come from the enforcement strategy, we should not kid ourselves that the job is done. So many entrenched social issues lie behind the problem that we need strategies that deliver in the short, medium and long term. The Home Affairs Committee report does justice to that need—that aspiration, that requirement—if we are to achieve what our communities and our society need us to achieve in dealing with this intractable and difficult problem.

Keith Vaz: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind comments. That is why it is important that the dialogue should continue and not be based just on a debate of this kind. The relationship that has been built up between the parties on the issue has to continue if we are to find a long-term solution to the problem. Knives will always be with us. So long as they remain in the kitchen and people need them to eat their meals, they will always be there. We need to keep the dialogue going.

James Brokenshire: The right hon. Gentleman is right that we need an informed debate. He will remember the debate on knife crime in this Chamber 12 months ago, in which we both took part. He said then that he felt that the debate was consensual, that there was common ground and that there were issues on which we had agreement across the House. We need to focus on those areas where we can seek agreement. At the same time, however, there will be differences. We will not shrink from being critical or from highlighting failures or those areas where the approaches taken are not effective. It will be important to have a constructive dialogue and debate about such matters.
	The right hon. Gentleman raised in his report the important point about how we need an informed and considered approach to the issues and about how, sadly, the knives out on the streets largely come from the kitchen. The previous focus was on knife amnesties—he will remember the almost annual pictures of the knives handed in to police stations—but they had the wrong emphasis, because the knives largely came from the kitchen drawer, as his report rightly highlighted. Indeed, that was also the feedback that we received from the police.
	We also need to focus on some of the implications of violent video games and DVDs and the factors that might lead somebody down the path of committing violent crime. That will become more challenging. One issue that I am focused on is the move from traditional media to the internet and what that may mean for the ability to regulate and give parents the right signposting about the material and information being used. That issue will become more complicated.
	The insights into the criminal justice system and the role of young offender institutions that my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) shared with us were very important. I am struck by the fact that some perverse incentives exist for local authorities, whereby it is almost cheaper for them to have someone in a youth offender institution than it is for them to make some of the interventions or do some of the practical work in the community that might stop a young person ending up in that situation. We need to focus clearly on that.
	I do not think that anyone in the Chamber can have failed to be moved by the comments that the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) made about the appalling case of Claire Wilson, the 21-year-old mother-to-be who was stabbed to death, and about the impact that it has had on the community in the hon. Lady's constituency. I am sure that everyone in the House would wish to pass on their best wishes and respects to Miss Wilson's friends and family and to all those who have been directly affected by that appalling incident.
	Equally, the hon. Lady highlighted the fact that we must not lose sight of the good community work being done across the country. I pay tribute to those working in her constituency and to those, as we have heard, working in constituencies across the country. Sporting activity can be used as a way of engaging young people, not simply by giving them something positive to do, but by being a catalyst to leverage in positive things such as education, self-respect and self-esteem, which can make a long-lasting difference.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening) has had a long-standing interest in combating gangs and the postcode approach. Young people are being robbed on the street because of their possessions. She also made an important point about how the British crime survey has only belatedly taken the under-16s into account.
	The hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) made a powerful contribution about how we should not treat young people as an amorphous group. I had a discussion with about 200 young people that was organised by the YMCA. One young person posed this question to me: "If you saw a group of older people out on the street, would you describe them as a gang?" That young person was trying to articulate the fact that people are grouped too readily. We should look at young people as individuals and try to see the challenges and issues that they face, rather than trying to say that all young people are bad or writing people off. The points that the hon. Lady made were very powerful.
	I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) that we need a measured debate. Knife crime is not something that we should see as being confined simply to inner-city areas; rather, it is more wide ranging. I have read the Centre for Social Justice report in detail and have met colleagues as well.

Hugo Swire: We are talking mainly about gangs and knife crime this afternoon, but in my constituency—the quiet backwater of East Devon—we had a terrible incident in Sidmouth involving somebody with a samurai sword. There followed a big campaign against samurai swords, although I thought that it did not go far enough in addressing the culture of knife crime. Will my hon. Friend take into account the fact that the problem affects individuals in more remote locations, as well as urban and inner-city gangs?

James Brokenshire: My hon. Friend makes his point well, and I am sure that we will all reflect on how the issue touches so many different communities.
	Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) gave his insight, as a special constable, into knife crime and the use of stop and search. We have proposed some amendments to stop-and-search powers to give greater discretion to community sergeants at the heart of safety neighbourhood teams. We need to focus on that issue to develop it further.
	This has been a good, constructive debate. We look forward to continuing to engage with the Government on the issue, but as I have said, we will hold them to account if they fall short on the aspirations of our communities.

David Hanson: I thank hon. Members for the constructive way in which this debate has been approached. This is my first debate in my new position as a Home Office Minister, just as it is my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary's first debate in his new role. I suspect that not all our debates will adopt the same tone, but this one has been very constructive.
	I should like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) for the positive way in which he kicked off the debate, and for tabling the motion before us today. He made the important point—which was echoed by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott)—that many young people are not, and will not be, involved in crime but lead good, decent lives. For those who have become involved in criminal activity, there is often a reason for their doing so. Part of our job as Ministers is to tackle those underlying reasons, as well as their consequences.
	I thank the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) for his welcome, and for his gracious tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), who served in my post for some years and did a sterling job, working with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr. Campbell), to focus everyone across government on the issue of knife crime and other important areas.
	We have had an interesting debate today on some extremely complex and disturbing issues. If we could solve them easily, the Government and the Opposition would undoubtedly do so. The hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) made an important contribution on culture and role models. The hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) talked about enforcement, early intervention and the role of custody, and about supporting alternative activities and family support. We heard a characteristically thoughtful speech from the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) about the use of custody and the need for intervention and education. He talked about partnership working, parenting, school failure and sentencing policy. He also touched on social justice and other related issues.
	These are all important issues that we are seeking to address, and we are committed to doing that through the youth crime action plan and the tackling knife crime action programme. I recognise the Conservatives' and Liberal Democrats' commitment to these issues, but I hope that the House will make no mistake: the Government are committed to trying to find workable, practical solutions to reducing knife crime and to tackling its underlying causes. These matters were also raised by the hon. Members for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb), for Monmouth, for Putney and for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), and by my hon. Friends the Members for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) and for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington. I shall come to the important report produced by the Select Committee chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) in a moment.

Tom Watson: I apologise to the House for not being here for the whole of the debate; I have been on a Committee. Many people say that a knife amnesty would make a contribution to reducing a knife crime, although it would not be the only answer. Would my right hon. Friend consider that option?

David Hanson: I welcome my hon. Friend's contribution, and pay tribute to his service in the Government as well. Knife amnesties have played an important part, and they are one of the tools that we can use to raise awareness of the need to tackle knife crime and to provide opportunities for some of the very dangerous weapons that can be found in households to be presented to an appropriate authority for disposal. When I was a Northern Ireland Minister several years ago, we had knife amnesties and took some very difficult weapons into proper police care. The same can apply elsewhere. That is an important strategy, and we need to consider it.
	The issues raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East and the report that his Committee has produced have made extremely useful contributions to the debate. Obviously, he will not expect the Government to respond to the report tonight. We will have to consider it in detail. In his speech, he mentioned culture, enforcement, family, violent video games and the use of custody. Those are important issues, not just for my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the Home Office but for the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the National Assembly for Wales in relation to education, and for the Ministry of Justice in regard to the responsibilities of the Youth Justice Board.
	I hope that the House will make no mistake: the Government are committed to tackling these issues in a detailed and effective way, especially in the light of the tragic case of this week's knife crime incident involving Claire Wilson, which was brought to our attention by my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes. That case, and the meetings that I have had with victims of knife crime, bring home the real and tragic impact of such events.
	We need to focus on the issues that have been mentioned in the debate, as does the report produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East and his Committee. We have put in place the youth crime action plan, which has been given an additional £100 million of new money to tackle some of these long-term issues in the community. We are also focusing on the knife crime action plan, and on prevention, intervention, enforcement and education. Given what the Government have tried to do through those programmes over the past couple of years, I hope that the House will share our aspiration to tackle these problems effectively.
	The knife crime action plan initially put £7 million into 13 areas—that has now been extended to 16 areas—to have a serious impact on high levels of knife crime and to tackle the issues that we have discussed today. The plan includes the use of stop and search and of search wands to detect illicitly carried knives. It also involves extra policing positively to deal with these issues. This is about partnership. The plan also involves raising awareness, and encouraging schools to undertake wider education programmes. Only this morning, I visited Croydon, where I looked at a reparation scheme, visited a local school and met local community support and police officers who are undertaking alternative activities such as evening football clubs. They are trying to provide alternative activities to divert young people from falling into crime.
	We now have 5,300 safer school police patrols, and extra money is going into family intervention. Money is also going into Friday and Saturday night activities under the knife crime schemes and the youth crime action plan. Thanks to work done by my predecessor and other colleagues, £3 million is going into advertising campaigns, because it has been found that showing young people the consequences of knife crime has given rise to a greater awareness among 73 per cent. of 11 to 16-year-olds.
	Through the sterling work of the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth, we now have great support from retailers who are signing up to not selling knives to under-18s, and we are working on online knife crime activity and looking at schemes such as the knife amnesties that my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, East just mentioned. There have been 200,000 stop and searches in one year, which discovered 3,500 knives and gave an element of enforcement at the same time.
	I take the point made by the hon. Member for Eastleigh that we need to improve our data sharing. We strongly support the Cardiff model; Jonathan Shepherd came to the knife crime action steering group earlier this year. Already, 45 hospitals in the tackling knife crime action plan areas are sharing data—twice as many as only a year ago. We are also putting hundreds of thousands of pounds into the Department of Health and the Home Office to train NHS staff and the police to share data.
	The hon. Member for Woking mentioned literacy and numeracy. We have talked about these vital subjects on many occasions. Education, training, sport and purposeful activity in custody provide the route to preventing reoffending. There is agreement that short-term sentences are not the most productive use of custody for individuals in our community, and we are now working on the intensive fostering projects that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and on the use of alternative community penalties. Later this year, a new reparation order will come on stream through the Ministry of Justice, providing another step before custody needs to be considered. There is general agreement among Members—with the honourable exception of the hon. Member for Monmouth, with whom we often disagree on these matters—that alternatives to custody are important. We need to look at partnership working, and to work with not only the police but youth offender teams, local councils and the voluntary sector—as mentioned by the hon. Member for Putney—when dealing with these issues. We also need to look at sentencing.
	Under this Labour Government, more people are being caught, more people are being sentenced, and more people are receiving longer sentences. We have seen the doubling of the maximum sentence for the possession of knives and an increase in the minimum age for buying a knife from 16 to 18. People are now 55 per cent. more likely to go to prison for these offences than they were last year. The number of offences resulting in immediate custody has gone up by 23 per cent., and the average immediate custodial sentence has risen from 133 days to 184 days during that period. The outcomes mean that we have secured a 22 per cent. fall in knife-crime hospital admissions for teenagers. We have a culture of change, and we have had fewer deaths so far this year than last year. Those are all objectives that the House shares.
	I commend the Government's work and I thank the Opposition for their constructive approach. I give a commitment on behalf of this ministerial team that we will continue to press hard with our Education and Justice colleagues to ensure that we drive down the incidence of knife crime and, ultimately, the deaths resulting from it.
	 Question , That the amendment be made, put and agreed to.
	 Main Question, as amended, put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House believes that teenage knife crime and the increased incidence of carrying knives in many communities is one of the most critical social and law and order issues facing the country; welcomes the contribution made by the Home Affairs Select Committee in its Seventh Report, Session 2008-09, on Knife Crime, published 5 on 2 June 2009; commends the work done by voluntary sector organisations like the Damilola Taylor Trust to tackle the problem; and expresses the belief that the solution to knife crime will only come from cross-community co-operation to address its root causes; further recognises that tougher penalties are being implemented against those who commit knife crimes, including a rise in the proportion of those caught carrying knives getting custodial sentences; supports the expectation to prosecute for knife possession and doubling of the maximum sentence for carrying a knife in public from two to four years; recognises that the Government has backed tough police enforcement action in the Tackling Knives Action Programme areas, including increased use of stop and search, noting that there were nearly 200,000 stop and searches, resulting in the recovery of over 3,500 knives, between June 2008 and March 2009; welcomes the additional investment going to providing targeted youth activity, including on Friday and Saturday nights; and welcomes recent provisional NHS figures showing a reduction in hospital admissions of teenagers following assaults by sharp objects.

Housing

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I advise the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Grant Shapps: I beg to move,
	That this House expresses disappointment at the minimal take-up of the Government's Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme, Mortgage Rescue Scheme, many of the Homebuy schemes, and the facility for zero stamp duty for zero carbon homes; notes that the Government's planning guidance on housing has led to a glut of flats, the destruction of gardens and a shortage of family homes; asserts that the lowest level of housebuilding since World War II exposes the failures of the Government's top-down and undemocratic regional planning process; believes that the Government's Home Information Packs have harmed the housing market further during the recession; regrets the Government's failure to publish a Housing Reform Green Paper; and registers disappointment at the rapid and regular change in housing ministers leading to the appointment of a fourth Housing Minister in less than 18 months.
	I offer a warm welcome to the new Minister for Housing as he takes up his post. I know that his background and experience will be an asset to this important Department. He actually becomes the ninth Housing Minister since this Government came to power. He is the fourth that I have faced across the Dispatch Box in the last two years and the third in the last nine months. I therefore hope that he enjoys better security of tenure than his three immediate predecessors, who lasted 211 days, 254 days and 246 days respectively. I would not want to bet my house, however, on the right hon. Gentleman lasting beyond the next election.
	I would like to offer the Minister a piece of advice; I encourage him to look at the recently produced Conservative green paper on housing, which puts forward a number of ideas that the Government could adopt immediately for their own housing programme, although it seems to have caused a little confusion with the right hon. Gentleman's immediate predecessor, who seems to have taken our "right to move" policy a little too literally.
	I know that the right hon. Gentleman sat around the Cabinet table for the first time this morning. He may have harboured concerns that it was his rugged good looks that had won him a seat around the Cabinet table, but I am absolutely confident that he is there for much more than window dressing and that he will do a fine job. I wish him every success.
	Let us start this evening's debate by thinking about those people who are lucky enough to own their own homes, but who are desperately trying to keep them by paying their mortgages. The Prime Minister likes to stand regularly at the Dispatch Box and claim that he is offering "Real help now" through the home owners mortgage support scheme, intended to allow people to postpone paying interest on their mortgages for up to two years. It was announced on 3 December, but not launched until 21 April, with an estimated 17,000 people repossessed during that period of delay. Perhaps the Minister will tell us how many households have so far received help under that scheme.
	The Chancellor called the new scheme real help for home owners at risk of repossession, but it is not even available to many home owners. When first announced, the then Housing Minister claimed it would cover some 70 per cent. of the mortgage market. She said that she wanted to see "all lenders" signed up to the scheme, but the reality is that fewer than half of mortgage lenders are signed up to the scheme, with some estimates suggesting it may not be much more than a quarter. Since the former Minister for Housing claimed she wanted to see them all signed up, can the present Minister for Housing tell us when he thinks that might eventually happen?
	When the scheme finally launched on 21 April, the then Minister also said that six other lenders would shortly join the scheme. She described that as happening "as soon as possible", but the new Minister was kind enough to reply to a parliamentary question just yesterday, saying that only one additional mortgage lender had so far joined the scheme. Will he tell us when the other five are going to join it?
	If the home owners mortgage support scheme has not worked, how about the mortgage rescue scheme? Now this is a scheme that invites registered social landlords to buy up equity in the homes of anybody struggling to pay their mortgage. It was announced on 3 September, but not launched until 16 January. This was a two-year, £285 million scheme designed to help 6,000 of the "most vulnerable families" to avoid repossession. Four months into the two years, instead of anything like 6,000, just two families have been rescued. Perhaps the Minister will therefore confirm that on the current trend, only 12 families will be helped by this scheme over the two-year period. I understand that that is despite more than 4,000 home owners approaching their local authorities for help and an estimated 31,000 homes repossessed since the time the scheme was launched.

Bob Russell: The hon. Gentleman mentions the most vulnerable people, so will he explain why the motion by Her Majesty's official Opposition makes no reference to council housing, social housing or affordable housing?

Grant Shapps: I am grateful for that intervention because it gives me a chance to remind the hon. Gentleman that we held a debate about the lack of social housing in our last Opposition day debate on housing, although I am not sure whether he attended. He will also be pleased to know that I am coming to that subject in this debate because it is relevant to the Government's overall housing record.

Phyllis Starkey: I think I heard the hon. Gentleman say that 4,000 households had approached local authorities with queries about the mortgage rescue scheme, but data given to the Select Committee only last week suggested that only a few more than 1,000 had done so. Will he explain where he got the 4,000 figure from?

Grant Shapps: I believe that the 4,000 figure came from the Local Government Association, but I would be happy to check the figure if the hon. Lady would like to drop me a line about it.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Grant Shapps: Let me make a little progress.
	What I want to know is whether the Minister can tell us how much of the headline grabbing £285 million of "Real help now" under this mortgage rescue scheme has been spent on rescuing just two households. The previous Minister said last November that the mortgage rescue scheme would provide "Real help now" to homeowners facing "tough times". Will the Minister for Housing say something today to the thousands of families who, having been given completely false hope, have been repossessed in the mean time?

Andrew Love: The Council of Mortgage Lenders recently announced that the original figures for repossessions in this financial year would be downgraded, following last year's figures, which were lower than expected. How does the hon. Gentleman explain the fact that there are going to be fewer repossessions than were originally expected?

Grant Shapps: Frankly, when repossessions are running at an all-time high, with the only exception being— [Interruption.] If the position is this bad with so many families having their homes repossessed—the highest number for a generation—it is no great success and nothing to crow about if perhaps only 50,000 rather than 75,000 families are thrown out of their homes at a time when there are a bunch of failing mortgage rescue schemes going on.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Grant Shapps: I want to make some progress.
	The important issue I want to raise with the Minister is what he has to say to the many families who have lost their homes when these schemes, which have been so headline grabbing and achieved 24-hour news coverage on their immediate announcement, have done so little to help families in real distress.

Joan Walley: There is an important issue here, so I would like to ask the hon. Gentleman how long people had to wait under the previous Conservative Government to be eligible for help and assistance with their mortgages. Is it not this Government who have brought the time limit down to 13 weeks?

Grant Shapps: Under the last Conservative Government, the time limit was 13 weeks, and then it improved again when the economic situation improved, but the present Government have brought the limit back down once again. I am quite happy to stand at this Dispatch Box and answer all sorts of questions from Labour Members, but today's debate is about this Government's housing record and we want answers to the questions people out there are asking. I do not mean only people being repossessed; we are also talking about people who desperately want to buy their own homes, but who find it harder than ever to get on to the housing ladder. Affordability is now at an all-time low with average affordability having halved since Labour came to power.

John Redwood: Has my hon. Friend noticed that since the introduction of the home improvement pack scheme there has been a big decline in the number of homes available on the market? Although that is not the only factor, can he reassure us that such expensive and unnecessary bureaucracy will be scrapped by the new Government?

Grant Shapps: I said that the new Minister might want to pick up some of the tips in our green paper, and scrapping HIPs should be at the top of the list. They are a pointless, bureaucratic waste of time, and they are causing so much heartache out there. They are limiting the supply of new housing on the market, and making it much harder for first-time buyers to purchase properties.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Grant Shapps: Before I take any more interventions, I should like to say a little about those first-time buyers. Their number has fallen by more than 60 per cent. since 1997. It is even lower than the lowest figure during the last recession. The Government's policy has led to the lowest number of first-time buyers since records began.

Lembit �pik: I greatly enjoyed working with the hon. Gentleman when I held the housing brief. He has come on very well in the last 18 months. Does he agree that, for many potential first-time buyers, the key issue is the unaffordability of deposits? For all the promises made by the Government and, indeed, the banks, it is just not possible for first-time buyers with small salaries to find 25 per cent. of an enormous mortgage. That is one of the key barriers preventing the housing market from starting up again, certainly in Montgomeryshire and, I suspect, throughout the country.

Grant Shapps: Some credence can be attached to that intervention from a former Liberal Democrat housing spokesmantwo or three housing spokesmen ago, I believe. Indeed, I think that while I have been in my present position, there have been three or four Liberal Democrat housing spokesmen, as well as the same number of Housing Ministers.
	The Government's response to the issue of unaffordability has been to offer a plethora of new so-called homebuy schemes. One of them, the social homebuy scheme, is nothing if not confusing, conflicting and often contradictory in terms of itself and other schemes. It offered 15,000 families, supposedly by this point, the ability to buy part equity in their own social rented housing. Well, at this point, a mere 306 families have benefited from the scheme. Another scheme, another headline, and more disappointment for hard-pressed families out there.
	What about the HomeBuy Direct scheme? I hope that the House is keeping up with the many different homebuy schemes. HomeBuy Direct was a flagship 480 million scheme, announced on 3 September and intended to help key workers and those on modest incomes to buy new homes from developers. The Minister told us that 18,000 affordable homes would be sold in that way. However, we had to wait until the end of April 233 days, which is time enough for a Housing Minister to come and gofor any sales to proceed. I should be interested to hear what the uptake has been so far.
	MyChoiceHomeBuy was yet another homebuy scheme. I know that the former Housing Minister used to be confused by these schemes; I wish the current Minister luck in getting his head around them more quickly. MyChoiceHomeBuy was one of two very similar schemes. Both involved key workersfirst-time buyersowning a share in homes on the open market, and buying them with housing association help. However, MyChoiceHomeBuy ran out of money just one month after the beginning of the financial year, leaving thousands of applicants stranded.
	In the course of his work as a constituency Member of Parliament, the new Minister may have received e-mails such as the one that I received from my constituents Derek and Ellen, who wrote to me about their experience of MyChoiceHomeBuy. Both are key workers. They work for the NHS, and have young children. They were delighted, they say, when the MyChoiceHomeBuy scheme was recommended to them, and were delighted to be accepted on to it. They started to get excited and to look around homes. They viewed a number of dream properties that they had previously imagined to be out of their reach. Then they were told that the scheme had run out of money. That is not just their experience, but the experience of thousands of first-time home-buyers on modest incomes working in key positions.

Bob Spink: Did the hon. Gentleman share my disappointment that the Chancellor did not do more about stamp duty in the Budget? What would his policy be?

Grant Shapps: There are so many things that need to be done to get the housing market moving. I shall take them in order: most of them are in my speech. I share the hon. Gentleman's concern about many things done by the Chancellor, and by the Prime Minister before him, none of which have achieved the objectives in the housing market that the Prime Minister himself set out on entering No. 10.
	We have already briefly mentioned home information packs. Only today we have had further proof, from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, that the housing market is suffering as a result of expensive and bureaucratic HIPs. According to RICS, new evidence released today suggests that HIPs are distorting the market, which is leading to fewer new instructions to estate agents at a time when people are struggling to buy homes. The Minister could act decisively today: he could do something practical to help the market. I offer him an opportunity to tell us now that he will use his temporary powers to suspend HIPs. In that way, he could give real help to real people.

Anne Main: As my hon. Friend will know, when the Department for Communities and Local Government was looking into HIPs, even the then Minister had to admit to the Select Committee, in response to questions, that they were not delivering as they ought to have been and were having no real effect on the market. It seemed to all of us on the Committee that they were a complete and utter waste of time, and that the Department was having to beef them up to justify their existence.

Grant Shapps: My hon. Friend is right. It was clear to those who listened to the evidence given to the Committee that the former Housing Minister was not keen on HIPs, but curiously she never got around to scrapping them when she had the opportunity to do so. The new Housing Minister has a clean slate. He has an opportunity to do something positive today to help people. I hope that he will take the advice not just of the Opposition Front Bench, but of organisations such as RICS and many others which say that HIPs are completely and utterly useless.
	If the Minister is in the mood to do something for people, he should note that almost all first-time buyersnine out of 10could be exempted from stamp duty. That is another policy that he is welcome to borrow from us. He may knowif he does not, he will get his head around it very quicklythat, in a past Budget, the present Prime Minister said that zero-carbon homes would be allowed zero stamp duty. We asked, out of interest, how often that had come to pass. There had been a fair amount of time for the arrangement to bed in, and one would have thought that there would be a fair amount of stamp duty exemption. The answer was that only 18 homes had benefited, and that 70,000 of stamp duty relief had been granted. In my view, this was no more than a headline-grabbing idea, and it is clearly having very little influence out there. What will the Minister do to extend the programme?

John Gummer: Will my hon. Friend explain how the Government managed even that rebate, given that they have so far failed to define a zero-carbon home? That is why the housing industry is unable to prepare for the important changes that will come in 2016.

Grant Shapps: My right hon. Friend is spot on. After three and a half years of consultation on what zero carbon might mean, the Government have still not reached a decision. That is what is holding back the market. That is what is making it so difficult for housing developers to know which way to turn. I wonder whether the Minister will bring the three and a half year consultation to an end soon, or whether he is aware of a recent European Union decisionmade, I believe, within the last fortnightto exclude off-site renewables from the definition of zero carbon. I understand that that has been an issue of debate and confrontation between the Treasury and the DCLG, which have different versions of zero carbon. Will the Minister pledge today to end that debate, to end the three and a half year consultation, and to produce a definition of zero carbon so that people can get on with building homes?

David Taylor: I have carefully examined the 11 lines of the Opposition motion, and I find no reference at all to affordable housing for rent, whether delivered by local housing associations or local authorities. Is that not evidence of the Conservative party's continued hostility to local authorities in that regard, which was all too evident in the 18 years between 1979 and 1997?

Grant Shapps: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman attended, or has read the record of, the previous debate on affordable housing, which was called by the Opposition and held in our time. To answer his question directly, we have no opposition to anybody providing affordable housing; there is no great philosophical reason why people and organisations should not be able to provide the housing this country needs. If we are talking about the supply of affordable housing, it is well worth mentioning that this Labour Government, who supposedly were elected to help the people in greatest need, have in every single year of their tenure in office built less affordable housing for rent than either John Major or Margaret Thatcher. That is the reality of this Government's housing record.

Nicholas Soames: My hon. Friend knows very well the difficulty in building more houses in the south-east, which highlights the Government's monstrously bad record in this respect. Does he agree that it would make it easier for everyone if a commitment were given to put the infrastructure in place that could support these housing developments, instead of building houses in places that are completely unsuitable for the people who live there?

Grant Shapps: That is evidenced by the reality on the ground. Not only have fewer affordable homes been built, but this Government have on average built less housing overall in every year of their Administration. Something is going badly wrong, and what is not working is their regionalisation of housing policy. Planning and top-down targets are patently failing to deliver housing on the ground. The more it does not work, the more the Government think the way to make it work is to push harder and blame the people on the ground. They misunderstand the reasons why it is not working. People do not want building to be imposed on them; instead, they want to be part of the process of building their own communities.
	That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how housing works which we will correct. We will end regional spatial strategies, get rid of regional assembliesif the Government have not quite passed their legislation on that in timeand strip the regional development agencies of powers over planning, housing targets and numbers. We will return that to people on the ground, who can use those powers, together with incentives, to go ahead and build the housing that is really needed by local communities. In doing so, we will outperform this Government's appalling record on house building over the past 12 years.

Bob Russell: The hon. Gentleman is right to remind the current Government that the Thatcher and Major Governments built considerably more council houses, and to highlight this Government's abysmal failure in not building council houses over the past 12 years. May I ask him, however, if it is Conservative party policy to allow councils to build council houses?

Grant Shapps: As I have said, our policy is that under a Conservative Government anybody who wants to step up to the plate and build homes to house people in this country will be absolutely at liberty to do so.
	There are good reasons why these policies are failing. We have talked about the failure of regional planning and the inability to understand that people on the ground best know what is required to house people in their local areas. The green paper that I have referenced addresses ideas to bring in local housing trusts, which would enable local people to decide how and where that housing goes, and also to deliver their own planning permission to go ahead and create those new communities. That would do a great deal to bring forward new housing in this country, and it would do so much more quickly than setting up massive bureaucracies that are unpopular and not democratically elected.
	Let me now turn to a single example in my constituency, where this Government say that between 10,000 and 15,000 homes need to be built. We are not worried about the building of new homes; I happen to represent a couple of new towns and we are very comfortable with the idea of house building. The problem is that it is not right to stuff in 10,000 or 15,000 homes while closing the local hospital at the same time. Those are incompatible policies that have got even the local Labour and Liberal Democrat parties campaigning and leafleting with us against the Government's plans.

Jeremy Corbyn: If the hon. Gentleman is not keen on having any kind of centralised or national target, will he cast a thought towards Mayor Johnson's approach in London of abolishing London-wide targets and saying everything has to be achieved through negotiations with the boroughs? The result of that is fewer homes for social rent, less housing for those who desperately need it, and a mayoralty and leadership that does not seem as desperately concerned about social housing as the previous Mayor was.

Grant Shapps: When it comes to building far fewer social housing units, this Government have the record to beat. Under them, the net change in social housing stock has been a loss of some 480,000 units, so they have very little to crow about. In the past five years, 122,000 houses have been added to the social housing stock, but for the same period before 1997 the figure was 257,000. There has therefore been a dramatic slow-down in the number of homes added. Moreover, one in six homes is judged by the Government's own measure to be non-decent.

Karen Buck: If a local authority such as Westminster was therefore to make the decision that only 11 per cent. of all housing constructed in the borough year on year would be affordable, should it be allowed to do that even at the expense of spiralling homelessness and the second worst overcrowding rate in London?

Grant Shapps: It is key to fixing this housing crisis, for which the current Government more than any other have to take their share of responsibility, that we understand that the trick is to build more homes in total in order that everybody at every level of the housing market, right down to those people who are homeless, get the opportunity to live with a decent roof over their head. The obsession with targeting, numbers, sub-numbers and sub-targets is not solving the problem; in fact, it has made it much more acute. The people I meet when I visit homelessness shelters do not say to me that the problem is that the target for affordable home building is not great enough. They say that the problem is that not enough homes are built, and the people who run those organisations say the problem is that there is nowhere to move people. The root of the problem is that there are 480,000 fewer units of social housing under this Government. We cannot hide behind statistics such as the percentage of new-build; the problem is that this Government have built less affordable housing and less housing overall.

Karen Buck: If the percentages do not matter and only the numbers for the absolute provision of housing matter, why is it that a low percentage does not necessarily equate to better numbers, as we can see in the failure to meet housing need? Surely housing need should be going down when the numbers are going up, regardless of percentages, but that is not happening.

Grant Shapps: Since this Government came to power, the housing waiting lists have increased from 1 million to 1.8 million families. That means that there are probably between 4.5 million and 5.5 million people languishing on the social housing waiting lists. It is getting ridiculous to be constantly lectured on how policies involving targeting, top-down Government initiatives and headline-grabbing news could possibly be the solution when the Government have failed to solve any of the problems for more than a decade. We need a new approach and a fresh start, and we need to find ways to ensure that housing actually gets built in this country to an extent that is commensurate with what people require in local communities.
	We also need to solve some of our long-term housing problems, such as the so-called tenant tax. That is the confusing housing revenue accountor, rather, negative housing revenue account. It is a system whereby 140 of the councils that have their own stock or arm's length management organisations are paying into the pot and just 40 are getting something out of that pot. What happens to the rest of the money? It is sent to the Treasury, which keeps it. The sums involved are 200 million this year, projected to rise to 300 million next year. I know that many Labour Members who are interested in this subject recognise that that is a real problem. It is a tax on people who can least afford to pay it.
	As the Conservative who represents the most council tenants, I can tell the House that they look very poorly on the fact that up to 50 per cent. of the rent they have to pay goes out of the area. The money does not fix the homes in my constituency or help to build new homes, but is instead sent to the Government centrally. That is not a sensible way of going about housing policy and it is not helping anyone; it is taxing the poorest people through a tenants' tax. It is completely unfair and the Government admit that it is a problem. They have put it into one of their lengthy reviews. Can the Minister tell us when the review will finally report? It has been going on for about 14 to 16 months. When will the review into the negative housing subsidy finally reach some kind of decision and tell us what is going to be done about the tenants' tax?

Philip Hollobone: I am so pleased that my hon. Friend has raised that very important point. Council tenants in Kettering borough pay 12 million a year in housing rent, 3 million of which disappears out of the borough and into the Exchequer's coffers. If Kettering borough council was able to keep that 3 million, it could do a lot to improve local housing conditions.

Grant Shapps: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention. My local council pays over about 16 million and it is not as if there is not a big housing need. I have said that the Government want us to build 10,000 to 15,000 homes in the area. There is a logical way to get some of those homes built, but taking the money back to the centre is certainly not helping to tackle that problem.

Several hon. Members: rose

Grant Shapps: I am aware of the time and I wish to allow others the opportunity to speak, particularly the Front Benchers. As they will get a chance to speak anyway, it might make sense if I were to make a bit of progress.
	The Prime Minister came into office two years ago saying that housing would be this Government's No. 1 priority. He said that it was so important that whoever took the post of Minister for Housing would have to sit in the Cabinet and attend its meetings, yet, as we have seen, there have since been not three but four such Ministers. That is hardly the mark of a Government who are taking the subject seriously. Many of the Government's flagship policies have floundered and then sunk entirely. We have seen the collapse of the eco-town project. There were to be 10 eco-towns designed to deliver sustainable living around the country, but that good idea has been completely messed up by this Government's implementation and, as far as anybody can tell, there is no likelihood of the eco-towns ever seeing the light of day. We have seen derision about home information packs, and no progress has been made on the zero-carbon homes initiative or on the negative housing revenue account

Nick Raynsford: The hon. Gentleman has made a remark that I hope he will withdraw because it is clearly completely wrong. He said that no progress had been made on reducing carbon. Does he recognise that over the past few years a remarkable change has taken place in the approach of house builders, registered social landlords and other housing providers, who have responded positively to the initiative taken by the Government to try to drive up energy efficiency standards? Code level 3 is now being delivered and code level 4 is being delivered by many RSLs. There has been a complete change in attitude towards reducing carbon, so will he please give the Government credit for that?

Grant Shapps: I certainly respect the right hon. Gentleman's considerable experience in the housing world and on the topic of housing, but I am fairly sure that  Hansard will show that I was talking about zero-carbon homes, as in the stamp duty relief to which I made reference earlier. As I described, no progress has been made in defining what zero-carbon will mean. I went to some lengths to describe precisely how the Government have spent three and a half years considering the issue but have reached absolutely no conclusion.
	This Government have failed this country on housing: they have failed with their top-down targets; they have failed to give young people the opportunity to own their own home; and they have failed to protect those who are in their own homes but are desperate for some kind of help. Such people have been misled by the promise of real help nowthat has never materialised. The Government have grabbed the headlines, but the required home building has simply not happened. They have gone for the column inches, but we face a terrible legacy of Labour's failed housing policies. It is now time to end the headline-grabbing housing announcements and get on with building some homes.

John Healey: I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from House to the end of the Question and add:
	notes that the Government has put in place comprehensive support to help households avoid repossession, that 220,000 households benefited from Support for Mortgage Interest last year, over 1,000 households have received free advice from their local authority each month since the launch of the Mortgage Rescue Scheme and many more are expected to benefit through the Homeowners Mortgage Support scheme and pre-action protocol; further notes that the Government has helped over 110,000 households into shared ownership and shared equity since 1997 and that demand for HomeBuy remains high; believes that the Government's zero carbon homes policy is a ground-breaking contribution to the fight against climate change; notes that planning policy makes clear the need for more family homes and that the Government is reviewing the evidence on garden development; notes that the highest rate of housing supply since 1977 was reached in 2007-08 and that the Government has brought forward many measures to help the construction industry, most recently 1 billion in the 2009 Budget, including 400 million to unblock stalled development and 100 million for council house building; further notes that regional planning is open and transparent and that regional planning bodies are required to take into account housing need; believes there is no evidence that Home Information Packs have any adverse impact on the market; and further notes that the Government is pursuing reform of council housing finance and the private rented sector and has set up the Tenant Services Authority to raise standards by putting tenants at the heart of regulation..
	I welcome this debate, and the remarks made by the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) at the start of his contribution. This is particularly the case on this, my second day in the job. The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Austin), is in his first day in his new post, although he has been a councillor and a housing officer in the past. This is my fifth job in government, and normally, Conservative Members have been kind enough to drop me a note of congratulation. This is the first time that I have encountered a motion of criticism tabled instead, but I welcome this chance for an early debate.
	I must say to the hon. Gentleman that I am following some very good Labour Housing Ministers, in particular my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett), who is one of the most distinguished, accomplished and loyal Labour Ministers I have had the privilege to serve alongside. I am proud to have been asked to do this job, because our home matters more to each and every one of us, and to our families, than almost anything else. It is hard to have a settled life without a decent secure home in which to live. If someone's home is at risk their life is in turmoil, and everything is insecure. I am proud to be in a party that has been serious about helping to improve and promote housing in this country, and to protect people in their homes.

Robert Syms: Council housing remains a very important part of the housing stock. The Minister will know the importance of reviewing negative subsidy on the housing revenue account. Can he give us some indication of when the review will report and we will know what the situation is? Poole has an arm's length management organisation that is very concerned about what its future will be unless the funding situation is changed.

John Healey: The short answer is soon. The slightly longer answer is that the detailed work, which the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield, who spoke from the Front Bench, will appreciate is complicated, has been largely completed. I am aware that this issue is one of the big concerns; it is one of the big jobs for me to nail, and I intend to do that soon.
	The Government have shownthis is why I am proud to be a Labour Housing Minister in a Labour Governmenta determination to try to improve the homes that people live in, to build the homes that people need to live in, and to help them to stay in their homes during this recession when they are at risk of not being able to do so. We have shown that during the 12 months of this economic downturn, and during our 12 years in government. We ended the long-term use of bed and breakfast for families with children five years ago. The number of families in temporary accommodation has fallen quarter on quarter for more than three years. More than 1 million people who are disabled or elderly, or who have other special needs, are able to live in their own homes because of the Supporting People programme, and more than 1 million families now live in decent homes because of our programme of repair and refurbishment, and because we dealt with the backlog left in 1997.

Jeremy Corbyn: I congratulate the Minister on his appointment. He must be aware that in London, particularly inner London, local authorities tend to place people in private rented accommodation rather than in council or housing association accommodation; that is because of the shortage. Huge rents are paid, usually by housing benefitand therein lies a benefit trap for people who are in such properties. Can he offer us some hope that not only will there be a substantial building programme to end that practice, but some progress will be made on rent control so that the public no longer, in effect, subsidise the excessive rents charged by private landlords?

John Healey: If my hon. Friend will bear with me, I shall come to tenants' rights. That issue has been on my desk, and what I was doing on day one of my job was trying to find ways to increase building in order to meet the needs, particularly during this downturn, of people in his constituency, in other parts of London and in the rest of the country.

John Redwood: I congratulate the Minister on his new job.
	In the boom phase of their boom-and-bust approach to housing, when prices were going up, Ministers told us that they were going up because not enough houses were being built. Why are prices now going down, and what is the remedy to falling house prices?

John Healey: Before we hit this downturn, we had the highest level of house building for 30 years, with more than 207,000 new homes completed. During this recession, the answer has to be a Government prepared to do moreprecisely the contrary to what we see from the Conservatives. They do not believe that the Government have a role to play, and they are not prepared to make the investment that is necessary. I have to tell the right hon. Gentleman that without the measures that we are trying to put in place, there would be more people losing their homes, fewer homes being built and a greater problem in providing the low-cost or low-rent housing that people will need in future.

Bob Russell: The Government amendment refers to 100 million for council house building coming from the 2009 Budget. Will the Minister tell us how many houses will be built for 100 million?

John Healey: It is difficult to know for certain, and we will have a much clearer idea in July when we have the first deadline for bids from local authorities for the special money that was set aside in the Budget. At that point I will be able to answer the hon. Gentleman's question more clearly.

Denis MacShane: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his appointment. Today in Rotherhammy constituency and his boroughI helped to open a new socially affordable housing unit that will provide a number of low-cost homes. That is the way forward.
	My right hon. Friend is Daniel in the lion's den today, and we should give him a break. However, the plain fact is that in the 1950s, his predecessor under a different Administration, Harold Macmillan, went out and built 300,000 homes a year, council and private. May I suggest that that is not the worst of ambitions? If we build homes for the people of Britain, they will not vote for the British National party in Yorkshire, and my right hon. Friend will be a full member of the Cabinet.

John Healey: I appreciate my right hon. Friend's support. He has always been a champion of my cause in government.

David Drew: That's the problem!

John Healey: Do you know, I had been wondering.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) is dead right, and the Prime Minister made a point about that idea several months ago. It is quite clear that local authority building has a bigger role to play. That was signalled in the Budget, but there is more that we can do. The Prime Minister said back in February that
	if local authorities can convince us that they can deliver quickly and cost effectively more of the housing that Britain needs...then we will be prepared to give...our full backing and put aside any of the barriers that stand in the way of this happening.
	That is a very important part of meeting the challenge ahead, and developing a bigger role for local authorities in helping to deal with the particular problems that they face in their areas.

David Taylor: I congratulate the Minister on his promotion to his post. The last word spoken by his predecessor about housing revenue accounts was in answer to a question that I asked last week. I put to my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett) the possibility of councils retaining all rent income so that they could reinvest in their local housing stock, build new houses and have the same access as registered social landlords to grants and loans to tackle the housing crisis. She seemed well disposed towards those suggestions and ideas, which have come from a wide range of organisations and individuals. Would the Minister say that he was a fan as well?

John Healey: I would, and in the spirit of what the Prime Minister promised, we are now changing the system so that local authorities can bid for housing grants on the same basis as housing associations. We are also ensuring that local authorities that receive grants from the Homes and Communities Agency can expect new homes to be excluded from the housing revenue account subsidy system. Those are steps to removing the barriers that we have seen in the past to councils playing a much bigger role in not just building but commissioning the houses that are needed in their areas.

Robert Key: I wish the Minister well in his aspiration to build more homes, but may I invite him to revisit the whole question of a one-size-fits-all housing policy for the country? He will recall that the former Salisbury district council ended up responding to the regional spatial strategy with a decision by the Liberal Democrat administration to build a huge new community in the middle of the countryside, with no infrastructure support. Will the Minister consider areas such as mine carefully? It has an area of outstanding natural beauty, a special area of conservation river, a world heritage site and a national park. Will he consider the absurdity that in those circumstances the planning authority does not have to listen to the water and sewerage companies? No statutory consultation with them is required, they are simply instructed, in completely inappropriate circumstances, You will provide the water and sewerage. We have to address that problem in the wider context of housing provision right across the country.

John Healey: In 48 hours I have heard a lot of jargon and read a lot of acronyms to do with housing, but a one-size-fits-all housing policy is not one that I have come across. It does not seem to fit the description that the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield gave of our approach to housing, and I certainly do not recognise it. As for the serious local concern that the hon. Member for Salisbury (Robert Key) has about his constituency area, if he will allow me I shall look in detail at the points that he has raised and write to him in response.

Andrew Murrison: As the Minister seeks to increase the available housing stock, may I commend to him the National Audit Office report of 18 March on service family accommodation? It highlights the fact that 18 per cent. of accommodation controlled by the Ministry of Defence is void, up from 15 per cent. in 2005, and against the Department's target of 10 per cent. Does he agree that that represents a huge waste, and will he speak to his colleagues at the MOD to see how much of that housing can be released to the general housing pool?

John Healey: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and I say to him genuinely that the NAO report was not part of the background reading that was provided for me on my first day in the job. I shall ensure that I look at it, and I will follow his points closely.

Ronnie Campbell: May I wish the Minister all the best in his new job? On the subject of the money that has been allocated to local authorities, is he aware that the new unitary authority in Northumberland plans to pull down 30 or 40 council houses in my constituency to build an old people's home? I am not sure whether the money was allocated for that reason, but does he not think that that plan is a bit wonky?

John Healey: I did not know about that particular scheme, which makes it difficult for me to pass judgment on it just on my hon. Friend's report, but if he wants to write to me with the details, I will be happy to take a closer look at it.

Clive Betts: I welcome my right hon. Friend to his new job, and I welcome the Government's commitment to make money available for councils to start building houses again. I hope that that is just a first step towards a much larger programme. I do not know whether he has yet had a chance to read the comments of Sir Bob Kerslake, the chief executive of the Homes and Communities Agency, to the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government the other day. He said that if the schemes were to succeed, local authorities making bids would have to be prepared to put their land in for free, to get the maximum value out of the Government's money. Can my right hon. Friend confirm that that is the case, and will he encourage local authorities to come forward with bids and put their land in, so that we get maximum value from the money available?

John Healey: There are few in the House with a greater knowledge of these matters than my hon. Friend, and he is exactly right. In the pitch that local authorities are making for part of the 100 million that we made available in the Budget for councils to build, we are looking for them to put their own land into the pot. That will contribute not just to the building of lower-cost new houses, but potentially to building the houses that are needed more quickly. That is part of the advantage of looking to local authorities to do more, in precisely the way that I want to see, as does the Prime Minister.
	I shall now say something about our response during the past 12 months. We have aimed to act swiftly to support those most affected by the downturnfirst of all, people and families at risk of repossession, and of losing the very thing that is at the centre of the stability of their life: their home. We have acted to try to help those with particular problems in the housing market, including first-time buyers. We have also acted to try to support the construction industry, as well as to maintain the supply of new homes. At the same time, we have tried to pursue the longer term goals of increasing the supply of new homes, especially for low-cost rent or purchase. We have also looked to raise the quality, in both design and environmental terms, of homes, as well as to reinforce the rights of tenants.
	Our approach to the recession and those at risk of losing their homes can be characterised in two ways. The first is an attempt to put in place universal support available to all, whatever their circumstances. The support for mortgage interest scheme helps more than 200,000 households through the benefit system. We acted in January to change the rules so that more people could get more help more quickly through that scheme. That is why the Council of Mortgage Lenders, in its evidence to the Select Committee, said that the
	reduction in the period for claiming income support mortgage interest was a pretty fundamental change...it has been of very significant assistance.

Robert Flello: I, too, congratulate my right hon. Friend on his well-deserved promotion. As he outlines the measures available, will he contrast those with the level of support available in the early 1990s, when interest rates were 16 per cent. and people faced negative equity and losing their homes?

John Healey: I have worked with my hon. Friend for a long time and I have a great deal of time for him, but he has just stolen some of my best lines. He is right. We have tried to ensure that we do not make the same mistakes the Tories did in the 1990s. Moreover, we have fundamentally different values, and a different view of the role of Government when people are struggling and the economy is in recession. That is why we have acted where we can to try to help people stay in their own homes. We have acted to try to help firms stay in business. We have acted to try to help people stay in work. That is the fundamental duty of a Labour Government when people are in trouble.
	The universal support that we have tried to put in place for all families and households irrespective of means and circumstances includes free access to advice desks in courts across the country. That is an important part of the help that has been made available. It also includes the negotiation of a comprehensive range of support from lenders through the home owners mortgage support scheme, which has ensured that lenders view repossession as a last resort, rather than moving faster to try to repossess.
	The motion mentions the special schemes for people in specific circumstances. For example, more than 130 vulnerable households have so far benefited under the mortgage rescue scheme. It does not necessarily entail a simple buy-back of those homes; it can meanas it has done in many cases a freeze in the repossession actions by lenders. The scheme is not simply about stepping in to take over the ownership and equity for people who cannot pay the mortgage at all. Local authorities report to us that as a result of the scheme, more than 4,000 households that have been struggling with their mortgages have received free advice from their local authority.
	The measures are designed to be more than the sum of their parts. The combination of mortgage advice, intervention in the courts and lenders viewing repossession as a last resort means that in the first quarter of this yeara time when many would expect repossessions to risewe have seen a 40 per cent. fall in applications to the courts by lenders to take possession of people's homes.
	The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield said that repossessions were at a record high. Repossessions were at a record high in the early 1990s. They were at a record high of more than 75,000 in 1991, when one in 12 households were in arrears and 1.5 million people were in negative equity. The combination of the action we have taken to try to help people stay in their homes means that at the very point at which one might expect the number of repossessions to go through the roof, as it did in previous recessions, only 12,800 were reported in the first quarter of this year. The result is that the director general of the Council of Mortgage Lenders said last month that his forecast of repossession numbers this year now looks pessimistic, and he expects to revise it. That revision is a direct result of the action that we have taken, in combination with lower interest rates and other actions that we have taken on the economy.
	We know that first-time buyers have been hard hit by a lack of credit, with lenders in some cases requiring deposits of up to 40 per cent. So despite falling house prices, they are unable to get on to the property ladder. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) mentioned home information packs, but it is the lack of access to credit that is the fundamental cause of stagnation in the housing market. There is no evidence to suggest that home information packs have added to the difficulties. On the contrary, a survey by Connells estate agents showed that sales with HIPs get to exchange six days earlier. ICM has highlighted the fact that more than eight out of 10 first time buyers in particular want more information, and HIPs are part of the answer.
	The hon. Gentleman invited me to look at his green paper on housing and stronger foundations. I have done so, and I was struck by several aspects of it, not least the introduction by the Leader of the Opposition. He said:
	Generations of families are trapped in social housing, denied the chance to break out...I don't want a child's life-story to be written before they're even born.

Grant Shapps: Very good.

John Healey: The hon. Gentleman says that, but it is social stereotyping of the worst sort. The truth is that council housing and housing association housing have provided security, strong communities and decent homes, meaning a decent start for many families that they would not otherwise have been able to afford.

Bob Russell: Can the Minister explain why, in 12 years of a Labour Government, fewer council houses were built than during the 10 years of Margaret Thatcher?

John Healey: I have talked about some of the things that we have done. I have talked about the mix of housing built by housing associations and by councils. I have also been clear about the fact that I see a much bigger role for councils in future. That is one of the big tasks that face me.

Alison Seabeck: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

John Healey: If I may, I wish to accept the invitation from the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield to look carefully at what the Tories are saying about housing. What comes over clearly is not a desire to build, to protect tenants' rights, or to give people a decent and secure home. Instead, it is a desire to remove the right to security from council tenants and housing association tenants

Grant Shapps: indicated dissent.

John Healey: Well, I have to say that, two days into this job, I am aware of a cacophony of Tory voices, some of them billed as experts and advisers on Tory policy, clamouring for the right to remove people's security of tenure, especially in local government housing. These are not marginal figures. They include the leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, who is a distinguished and influential figure in Tory party policy circles. He published a paper in which he called for
	tearing down the Berlin Wall of varying tenure and rent levels that operates between the private rented and social rented sectors.
	He advocates
	one form of tenancy, modelled on an Assured Shorthold Tenancy (AST), which any landlord could offer.
	In other words, 8 million people4 million familieswould have the security of their home reduced to a two-month notice period.

Phyllis Starkey: If I understand correctly, the suggestion by that Tory spokesperson was that the Berlin wall between rent in the private rented sector and the social rented sector should be torn down. Surely if rents in the social sector in London went up to the level of the private rented sector, everybody in council accommodation in London would effectively be unable to work because they would lose their home, as they would lose their housing benefit. Is that really the policy that the Opposition propose?

John Healey: That is the sort of intervention that I would expect from my hon. Friend. She sees very clearly that this is not just a question of removing the rights of tenure and removing security. The question of the Berlin wall between rent levels has profound implications of exactly the nature that she identifies.
	It is not just a matter of the Opposition removing the rights to security and the rights of council tenants or housing association tenants. The truth is that they do not believe in social housing in the first placethere is no mention of it in tonight's motion. That is the case at all levels of the party [ Interruption. ] They protest, but they have not put it in their motion. This is a debate about housing. If they believed in social housing, they would not be talking about cutting 800 million from the housing budget. They would not be talking about cutting 240 million from the budgets of local authorities. Those are not cuts for the future, but cuts that they would make now if they had the chance in government.
	I talked about that being true at all levels of the Conservative party. It is true at a national level, but what about London? What about the Mayor of London? He scrapped the Labour Mayor's 50 per cent. affordable housing targeta Labour Mayor and a Labour regime that believed in social housingin favour of what he calls negotiation with the boroughs. I will tell the House what has happened there: he is allowing them to shirk their responsibility to provide housing at levels that people can afford, whether they rent or buy. Members can look across the Tory boroughs at what this new Tory Mayor is allowing them to get away with. I mentioned Hammersmith and Fulham; my hon. Friends know

Andrew Slaughter: rose

John Healey: I shall give way to my hon. Friend; he knows Hammersmith and Fulham better than anyone else.

Andrew Slaughter: I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, not least because I cannot make the points that I would like to make in this debate, because my voice has gone. I am grateful that he has made the point about Hammersmith and Fulham, but will he bear it in mind that the points about abolishing security of tenure, market rents and having no responsibility for homelessness are not just ravings committed to paper? They are being implemented on my constituents today, with the demolition of their homes, the sale of their homes and the refusal, on purely ideological grounds, to build a single social rented property. What is happening in Hammersmith and Fulham today is the Tory plan for housing in Britain tomorrow.

John Healey: My hon. Friend talks about Tory ravings; I have another example. It is not just from any old councillor, but from one of the housing advisers at Westminster council. If Members are looking for ravings, then this is an interesting article from Localis, the policy platform. The adviser talks about supporting social housing as an
	absurd, unjust and unfair subsidy.
	If these were just ravings and writings, I would not be so concerned, but my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter) is right. He has told me about a development in Shepherd's Bush, on Bloemfontein road in his constituency. It is a 50 million development that, under the Labour Mayor and Labour council, was set to have contained 50 per cent. affordable housinghalf for low-cost sale and half for low-cost rent. Under the new regime, now that the Mayor of London has let local councils in London off any responsibility for providing this housing, that will now be only 39 per cent. affordable housing with no provision for rent at all. The truth is that the Conservatives do not understand this type of housing. They do not support it, but they just dare not say so this side of an election.

Karen Buck: My right hon. Friend mentioned the deputy cabinet member for housing in Westminster. Is he aware that in the same article the councillor went on to describe council housing as:
	A unique version of 'who wants to be a millionaire' UK welfare state style
	and as a
	subsidy production...machine with lottery style levels of winnings?
	Does that, to my right hon. Friend, suggest someone who supports providing affordable housing for low-income households?

John Healey: No, but I am glad that my hon. Friend has read the same Localis article as I have.

Robert Syms: Will the Minister give way?

John Healey: I willfor a second time, I think.

Robert Syms: The Minister is being very generous in giving way. Of course, his Government are taking 20 per cent. of the rents off my tenants in Poole and whizzing it into central London to Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham, Camden, Islington and the other authorities. If they are such lousy authorities in central London, why take 4 million from Poole?

John Healey: You were not in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, when the hon. Gentleman asked me a similar question about the review and the reform of the housing revenue account. I have given him his answer.

Karen Buck: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

John Healey: I will, but then I shall wind up as I know that other people want to speak.

Karen Buck: We have had several recommendations from Opposition Members that contributions to the housing revenue account from their local authorities should be repatriated. Does my right hon. Friend share my suspicion that, were there to be a Conservative Government, unless they pledged additional money for housing investment, tenants in areas such as minein Hammersmith and Fulham, in Westminster and so onwould be dramatically worse off?

John Healey: My hon. Friend, who understands these things as well as any other Member of the House, is right about those risks and about the dangers in the system. Precisely the same risks and hidden aims can be found in claims that the Opposition want to see localisation of the business rate, as that would drive a coach and horses through their ability to redistribute funding to local areas and local councils from areas that have the capacity and high tax base to raise it to those that have a low tax base but perhaps a high need for it.

Robert Flello: Will my right hon. Friend give way on that point?

John Healey: I was about to wind up, but as it is my hon. Friend of course I will.

Robert Flello: I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend, who has been making a superb speech. Will he clarify whether he is saying that under a future Tory Governmentheaven forbidthe good folk of Stoke-on-Trent would have less subsidy for council housing in their area?

John Healey: That is easy. What is clear for Stoke-on-Trent is that were the Conservatives to come into Government, the funding for housing would be cut, the funding for local councils would be cut and the people of Stoke-on-Trent, many of whom need that support from central Government, would simply not get it?

Andrew Love: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

John Healey: As my hon. Friend presses me to do so, I will.

Andrew Love: I thank my right hon. Friend for being so generous with his time. I wanted the opportunity, like many others here tonight, to congratulate him on his new role, which he is fulfilling with great promise this evening. The implication of what he said about Conservative party policy is, of course, much greater. The last time the Conservatives deregulated rents, they said, Let housing benefit take the strain. The implication for public expenditure of such proposals from a party that says that we have to restrict public expenditure is either that such expenditure will go through the roof or that tenancies will be jeopardised across the country.

John Healey: Spot on. I can see why my hon. Friend serves with such distinction. He is certainly not wasting his time on the Select Committee on the Treasury, and I regret only that that commitment meant that he had to step down as my Parliamentary Private Secretary. I am grateful for the support he gave me, although I think that the period was too short.
	The motion ignores entirely our record of success over the past 12 years, with unprecedented investment in social and affordable housing and unprecedented investment in dealing with a backlog of repairs and homes for 2 million people that simply were not decent enough to live in. It ignores the fact that house building in 2007-08 was at the highest level for 30 years. It ignores the dramatic falls in the levels of homelessness and the changes in the planning system that will make things faster, fairer and more strongly democratic. It also ignores the recent reforms that give tenants stronger rights and a more powerful voice.
	The Government's amendment provides a fuller and fairer picture of our housing policy record. I am proud of much of what we have achieved so far, but I am also clear that we have a great deal more to do. We must do much more to help people get into the homes that they need, and to stay in the homes that they have. In particular, we have a great deal more to do to ensure that the homes that people need in future are built and available for them.
	That is my task, as Housing Minister, from tomorrowfrom day three.

Sarah Teather: May I begin by welcoming the Housing Minister and all the new ministerial team to their roles? Obviously, the Minister is not new to the Department, but I am sure that he will find the housing brief the most interesting and challenging part of the Communities and Local Government portfolio. Personally, I am disappointed and sorry to see his predecessor, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright), go to his new post as Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and I hope that the Minister will pass on my best wishes to him. It became almost a weekly ritual for us to debate housing in Westminster Hall, and he always made his points with charm and courtesy. I thank him for that.
	It is a great frustration for me to debate yet another Conservative motion that has nothing positive to say. The Conservative analysis of Government failures in housing seems largely correct: it is certainly true that the Government's mortgage support scheme has so far helped just two people, that the facility for zero stamp duty for zero-carbon homes has helped just 18, that Government policies are leading to woefully inadequate numbers of homes being built, and that almost all of them are small flats. It is also a statement of the obvious that the Prime Minister appears to show a careless disregard for his own Housing Ministers, but where are the new ideas in the motion?
	The motion is just one long whinge, and I for one find it deeply depressing. We have just lived through probably the most difficult few weeks in politics that I have experienced in my lifetime, and I suspect that most hon. Members will not be able to remember any time as difficult. Faith in representative democracy and in this place is at an all-time low: just one person in three turned out to vote last week, and it is really difficult to persuade people that politics actually matters and can make a difference.
	I have spent most of the last few weeks going into schools, and it has been harder than ever to convince young people that being an MP is an amazing and incredible job because one has an opportunity to change not just the life of one person, but whole systems. Yet we are stuck here until 10 o'clock on a Tuesday evening debating an Opposition motion that does not mention a single idea for changing anything at all. It is no wonder that voters are disillusionedI feel disillusioned too.

Robert Syms: The hon. Lady made a very good point about flats. Does she agree that one of the worst things about an overarching central planning system is that it gives us lots of flats that cannot be sold, when what we need are family homes? Many families are living in very overcrowded conditions, and flats are not the solution.

Sarah Teather: The Conservatives do not have any proposals to address that problem, which I am not sure is governed entirely by planning. I think it is mainly to do with targets and how housing associations are funded, but they do not seem to have any solutions in that regard either.
	I accept that the Conservative spokesperson has recently produced a couple of housing policy papers. The first, the so-called Shapps report, contained no policy proposals whatsoever, being just a string of graphs that some researcher had downloaded from the DCLG website. His later papers on empty properties and building homes were notable for a much higher quality of graphic design, but that was not enough to distract me from the absence of any promises of new money.
	The problem is that abolishing central targets alone will not build any new homes. We agree that it will build different types of homes, but it will not build any more homes. If the Conservative spokesperson is so pleased with the policy papers that he has produced, why on earth did he not put anything of what they contain into the motion that we are debating today? Instead, we have 11 lines of sweet Fanny Adams to discuss.

Anne Main: The hon. Lady is disputing whether we should argue over targets, but I am sure that she will accept that the Liberal Democrat council in St. Albans has successfully defeated the Government's regional spatial strategy on targets. I welcome that, as local people should decide how many homes there should be and where they should be placed. It is not just a question of having more and more homes: we need to put the infrastructure in place first, and then give local people the power to make decisions. I should have thought that she would welcome that, and not say that we need more houses regardless of what local people want.

Sarah Teather: If the hon. Lady had listened, she would know that I did not dispute the proposal to abolish central targets. What I said was that that alone would not build any new houses.
	We attempted to amend the Conservative motion and, although our amendment was not selected for debate, it is on the Order Paper and hon. Members are welcome to read it. They will see that we accept the motion, and then go on to propose some solutionssomething lacking from anything put forward by the Conservatives.
	I accept the whingeing in the Conservative motion, and the criticism and analysis that it contains, but let us have some sort of solution that would make things better. Without that, why are we here? What were we elected for if we do not have any ideas for making Britain a better place? The motion is just pointless.

David Drew: I hope that I can help the hon. Lady. Nowhere in the Conservative motion or the amendments proposed by the Government and the Liberal Democrats is there any mention of rural housing and the crisis that exists there. I know that hon. Members in all parties know exactly what I am talking about. As the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) knows, I am a great advocate of community land trusts. We have to look at rural areas, as the housing crisis is not confined to urban Britain. Our towns and villages have insufficient housing for people of lesser means, and I hope that the hon. Lady will agree that we have to address that as well.

Sarah Teather: I agree completely with hon. Gentleman, although I point out that my amendment deals only with housing and makes no mention of the words urban or rural specifically. I also agree with him about community land trusts, which he and I have debated in Westminster Hall. The trusts are very important in Cornwall and many other rural areas, and they may even represent a policy on which we can achieve all-party agreement.
	I said that the Conservative motion was vacuous, but the Government amendment reminds me a little of the string quartet that kept playing as the Titanic sank. There is no acceptance of what is happening in the real world: the Government hunker down and comfort themselves by reeling off a list of statistics while closing their ears to the desperate cries of those who have lost their homes, who live in cramped and unacceptable homes or who have no hope whatsoever of getting even that.
	Some 1.8 million families are languishing on council lists waiting for a suitable home that they can afford to rent. In London, around one household in 10 is waiting to be rehoused. In my constituency, the figure is even higher, with one household in five stuck on the waiting list for a council or housing association property.
	Earlier, the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) mentioned the link with the British National party, and I think that he is right. Some of the areas worst affected in terms of housing are in the old Labour heartlands. The very people who elected this Government are the ones most let down on the issue of housing.
	Housing is a powder-keg issue. It ignites rows about race and immigration, and it provokes people to lose faith in the system. It is the very issue that fascist parties rely on to breed resentment and hate. The Leader of the House is correct to say that the Government should take responsibility for the rise of the BNP, and I completely agree. However, if there is to be any hope of tackling that sort of fascist politics, housing is where the Government have to start.
	What is needed is a serious investment in affordable housing to rent. The Government invested 12.5 billion in a VAT cut that made little or no difference to people's lives, when they could have spent that on building tens of thousands of more homes for people to live in.
	The Government also need to accept that the old cross-subsidy model of house building is not going to build any new homes in the short term. They need to scrap Treasury targets on the number of units per unit of subsidy so that housing associations have the confidence to know that they can use the money available to build without facing penalties later.
	It is ridiculous that at the very time in a recession that we need house building to increase, building has been grinding to a halt. So much for the fiscal stimulus. By the time we get out of the recession, housing need will be greater, house prices will again spiral out of control, and we will not be able to do anything about it because the builders will all have retrained or gone back to Poland. We will have nothing with which to tackle the problem.
	The Government have a real opportunity to improve housing now. Major investment now could absolve them of the sins of the past 10 years. I hope they will realise that they have an opportunity now and a clear way to make amends. I was pleased to hear the new Minister say how important he thinks it is that councils should be able to build homes. Councils are desperate to be able to build new homes for families in their area. They have to pick up the pieces when homeless families land on their doorstep, but they have only limited powers to fix the problem.
	The Prime Minister made warm noises about that several months ago, but the proposals that were put forward were thin on the ground. The Minister was not sure how to answer the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) on how many new homes would be built with the new money available. We calculated that it would be about 900 homes. That is two or three for every local authority area, which will make only a tiny dent in the number of 1.8 million people on housing waiting lists.
	If councils are to be able to borrow to build, they need to know what their asset base and their rental income will be. Taking new homes alone out of the housing revenue account is not enough. We must have fundamental reform of the housing revenue account system now. I am pleased to hear from the Minister that it will conclude soon, but we have heard that for a very long time. Every time there is a change of Housing Minister, it gets further delayed.
	I was pleased to hear the Conservative spokesperson join our campaign to end the tenant tax, but I was left a little unclear about what the Conservatives' proposals would be. The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) stated the position well for me. In my constituency, Brent, we receive a subsidy from poor tenants in Cambridge. It is invidious for poor tenants in Cambridge to be subsidising poor tenants' repairs in Brent, and a solution is needed. Our solution is that that should be topped up out of general taxation. People like me, who can afford to pay out of their taxes, should pay for that, but the Conservatives have no proposal at all, which means that there will be no money for repairs in places like my constituency.

Robert Syms: The hon. Lady makes a good point. For all political parties, need has always been the basis of housing. If there is a debate about whether some areas should have resources and some should not, there has to be some kind of compromise. General taxation is one way of doing it, but at present the negative subsidy is rising so fast that in five years most councils will not have council housing stock, because of what is happening to the financial system.

Sarah Teather: I entirely agree that we must end the system of negative subsidy. It is ridiculous. Councils cannot plan because they do not know what money they will have from one year to the next. They need to know that their rental income is available to reinvest in their housing stock for repairs or for building, and so that they have something against which they can borrow, knowing what their future revenue stream will be. The Treasury currently keeps about 200 million of the money coming in from rental income, so it is not as though all of it is going to repair houses in other parts of the country. It is unacceptable for the Chancellor to keep a portion of that rent.
	The second thing that the new Minister should do urgently is to give councils back their right-to-buy receipts. Only then can councils replace the homes lost through right to buy, to make sure that future generations have a chance of somewhere to live. Since 1980, 2.5 million council properties have been purchased under right to buy from a council stock that then stood at 5 million. It is no wonder that councils have nowhere for people to live.
	Taken together, new money, investment of rental and right-to-buy income, and extension of powers to borrow would make a real difference to councils' ability to build homes that people need. But in the Conservative motion and in their green paper, they have no plans to do that. They have plans to review the HRA system and to end the tenant tax, but no plans to top up finance that is lacking for repairs. They have no plans to invest more money in social homes and no plans to give councils back money from right to buy, so I cannot see how they can deliver on their promise to build more council homes.

Bob Russell: Does my hon. Friend recall that I could not get an answer from those on the Conservative Front Bench on whether a Conservative Government would bring back the building of council housing?

Sarah Teather: Yes. It was a depressing moment. The Conservative spokesman seemed to be unclear which direction he would go in, were he to become a Minister. We are calling for a general election and he hopes to become a Minister, but he does not seem quite sure of the direction in which he would take his party.

Andrew Love: I have been listening carefully to the hon. Lady's incredibly disparaging remarks about the Conservative party's policy in this area, yet the Conservatives do not seem to be prepared to answer on any of the issues. Does that not speak volumes about the vacuity of what the official Opposition are offering?

Sarah Teather: Yes. My hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy) said to me from a sedentary position that she was not sure whether that was because the Conservatives did not understand or did not care. I shall not be as mean as that, but they seem to be unwilling to put their policies out there so that people can scrutinise them and argue with them. I do not understand why they are elected if they are not prepared to debate ideas. It seems to me that that is why we are here.

Andrew Slaughter: It seems strange to be debating the matter when the Conservatives are here but silent. As they are silent, let us continue debating it. The hon. Lady heard the answer from my right hon. Friend the Minister. We know what the Conservatives' policy is because their think tanks are telling us. It is no more social housing, no security of tenure, market rents, no responsibility for homelessness, and effectively the end of social housing in this country. They will not say that because they know that 8 million people out there will rumble them if they hear it.

Bob Russell: You can say that again.

Sarah Teather: I suspect that the hon. Gentleman could not do that and I should offer him some advice as someone who lost her voice after being ill. It is best to keep quiet. It will heal much more quickly if he says less, I promise, but I thank him for his intervention.
	I shall continue to be a little bit rude to the Conservatives, and then I shall move on. On right to buy, not only have they no plans to give back right-to-buy receipts, but they want to extend right to buy to housing associations. That idea has been universally condemned. Housing associations already face great difficulty because of the current economic climate, and the Conservatives want to remove their rental income and dwindle their asset base. Who on earth do they think will lend money to them to build homes under those circumstances? Worse, a requirement to sell properties at below market values would be against the charter of most housing associations. It is not a feasible or a sensible policy to take forward.

Martin Horwood: Does my hon. Friend agree that the right to buy council housing stock led to cherry-picking and the loss of some of the best council housing stock, and meant the ghettoisation of some council housing? Does she not fear that exactly the same thing would happen if Conservative policy for other social landlords were implemented?

Sarah Teather: My hon. Friend makes a good point. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) recently made a similar point about right to buy as part of the report for the Centre for Social Justice.
	In addition to building new homes, it is important that we make a more concerted effort to bring empty properties back into use. The hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) made a point about MOD housinga point that my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester has made many times in the Chamber. It is an excellent point, but we need to be willing to think flexibly also about empty commercial space during a recession, and to be prepared to offer short-life housing to people who want it. The single most important thing that the Government could do to help to bring empty properties back into use is to make renovating them cheaper. They should cut VAT on renovation, rebuild and then make grant available to housing associations to repair the empty properties that they buy, because at the moment they cannot use Homes and Communities Agency money to do so. The Government should also offer grants and loans to individuals to repair properties in return for lets to social housing tenants. All those things would make a difference.
	The Conservatives' key policy for tackling empty properties is to reduce the space and design standard for social homes, and I wonder whether they have any idea how long the average social tenant spends in temporary accommodation. If one puts a tenant into a draughty or cramped unsuitable home as a supposedly short-term measure, most will still be suffering in unsuitable housing a decade later.

Anne Main: I am following the hon. Lady's argument on empty properties with great interest, because empty dwelling management orders, as she knows, are a totally under-utilised device. Indeed, they have been completely under-utilised by the Liberal Democrat-led council in St. Albans, so before she lectures all of us on bringing back empty homes, I should say that I have been pressing my council to get its empty homes back into use. However, it has not as yet chosen to use that device. We could all lecture each other on empty homes, so I hope that the hon. Lady will bear that in mind.

Sarah Teather: I am greatly relieved to hear the hon. Lady's conversion to EDMOs, because her party opposed them when they were debated in this place.
	Early in the debate, a lot of time was spent poking fun at the Government's mortgage rescue scheme and its total inadequacy in the face of the 50,000 or 70,000 repossessionsdepending on which estimate one takesthis year. However, I shall give some credit where credit is due, because the Government have done some welcome things, particularly on the changes to income support for mortgage interest. When we add up all the different schemes, however, we still have the problem whereby tens of thousands of people fall through the net and face having their home repossessed. Similarly, if the landlord of a bought or buy-to-let property gets into difficulty, the people renting such properties may find themselves on the street with no notice whatever.

Julia Goldsworthy: My hon. Friend was just talking about how the mortgage rescue scheme has failed to help many people who face losing their homes. Last week, a very worrying case was raised with me of an individual who, at the beginning of December last year, thought that they would be one of the first beneficiaries of such a scheme, but, at the end of April, they were told that they no longer qualified. During that period, their mortgage payments were frozen, and they are now more likely to face repossession as a result of their being rejected for the scheme. Should not the Government be helping to prevent such problems rather than making matters worse?

Sarah Teather: I absolutely agree: it is a very worrying case. The difficulty is that many criteria have been drawn tightly, and it has been difficult for the people implementing the scheme to understand exactly what will happen as they go through the process. It takes a long time before someone is approved or found not to be eligible to claim help, and, in the meantime, they can get into great difficulty.
	The Government introduced a pre-action protocol that I thought contained many useful things. I agreed with all the protocol's sentiments, which we called for before the Government published it, but the problem is that it has no teeth, and I cannot understand why the Government are not prepared to reform mortgage law to give it teeth. If we were to reform mortgage law, we could give the courts the power to intervene to enforce some of the good things that are in the pre-action protocol. We would also be able to deal with the situation when a landlord's home is repossessed and the people who rent it get no notice at all, except when they go home and find that the locks have been changed. We can deal with much of that simply by giving the courts the power to intervene and then to put the rest into guidance, as the Government have done. I pressed the Minister's predecessor repeatedly on the issue, and I hope that the new Minister will consider it afresh.
	I am pretty fed up to be debating another Conservative motion that has nothing in it.

Grant Shapps: Why don't you call a housing debate?

Julia Goldsworthy: She'd have plenty to say.

Sarah Teather: I would have plenty to say, and there is lots more that I could say.

Grant Shapps: When are we going to have a Lib Dem housing debate?

Sarah Teather: We have fewer Opposition day debates, so the Conservatives might like to give us one of theirs. We would be quite delighted to lead on the issue.
	What depresses me is that the Conservatives have nothing to say on the issue and the Government seem to be sticking their head in the sand. It depresses me because my constituents need this place to take positive action and to do something to make their lives better.
	I shall end by telling the House a story that, I am afraid, is typical in Brent. Lucy has been living in temporary accommodation in my constituency for 14 years. She lives in a two-bedroom flat with her four children and bids regularly on the choice-based letting system. However, the highest that she has ever been ranked is 140th out of 300, and she has no hope whatever of moving. Her eldest child is now 16 and has lived in that unsuitable property for almost her whole life. She needs some rooma bit of quiet and privacy away from brothers and sistersto study for her GCSEs, otherwise the misery of her housing situation, which has blighted her whole childhood, will ruin her future, too. We need the Government to act for people like that. We have a new Minister; I implore him to make a new start.

Karen Buck: I, too, should like to welcome the Minister for Housing to that most important post. About three quarters of householders in this country are home owners. For most of those people, most of the time, being a home owner has been a happy and successful experience. It has benefited them and their families enormously. Obviously, the majority of people still aspire to be home owners. However, people in many of those families are experiencing real pain because of a combination of factors, including lack of affordability and changes in their circumstances; in some cases they will have lost their job. That leaves many families genuinely worried, and they are sometimes at risk of losing their homes. That rightly causes concern to all of us. My right hon. Friend has already recognised that in the early 1990s the level of repossessions, with all the pain that repossessions put families through, was at least as high as it is now; in some cases it was higher. However, that should not stop us focusing a great deal of attention and support on those families. It is absolutely critical that we do everything that we can to reduce repossessions and to help people through a difficult time.
	On looking at mortgage law, I agree with the hon. Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather) that we should in some cases do more to enforce controls against lenders who are excessively zealous in the action that they are taking. One particular group of people about whom we need to worry are tenants in buy-to-let properties. In some instances, we should also worry about unauthorised tenants in properties in cases in which the mortgage holder has defaulted. Such tenants have virtually no protection and are at risk of being thrown out, sometimes with no notice whatever. In many cases, they then become the responsibility of the local authority. I know that the Government are considering the issue; it is important that they look at it closely and act swiftly. For a host of reasonsfor the sake of the people involved, and because of the pressures on local authoritieswe need to do what we can to support those individuals.

Julia Goldsworthy: The hon. Lady makes an important point, and I agree it is important that the Government and the Minister should come forward with proposals as soon as possible. Does she agree that the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill, which is currently being considered by the House, provides an opportunity to make such proposals, and does she agree that the Minister should make the most of that opportunity to bring forward proposals as soon as possible?

Karen Buck: I have not looked closely enough at the clauses of the Bill to know whether it would be an appropriate hook, but I see no reason at all why Ministers should not at least consider whether it provides an opportunity. There is no question but that there are large numbers of vulnerable households in such properties, whom we may need to act swiftly to assist.
	Before I move on to the core of what I want to talk about, may I take the opportunity to raise with the Minister an issue that I have raised many times with his predecessors? It is the plight of local authority leaseholderspeople who own ex-local authority stock, having bought it, sometimes through the right to buy, but more frequently through resale. In some casesI am thinking of my constituentsas an unintended consequence of a desirable objective, namely the decent homes initiative, they face major works bills of 60,000.
	Some groups of such leaseholders enjoy various concessions when it comes to that repayment. In particular, those who are retired are able to put a charge on their property for sale. However, many younger, working households have not so far been able to avail themselves of a scheme that gives them any realistic opportunity of being able to repay without losing their home. I am seriously worried about that group of people, and I urge the Government to swallow the resistancea resistance that is also rooted in my local authority, Westminster, so it is cross-partyto providing practical support for those households. Some of them will lose their homes when those bills fall due, and they do not have the money to pay them.

Kelvin Hopkins: Is that not a factor resulting from encouraging people at the margins to try to get into owner-occupation? That, in the long term, is unwise because of the costs and risks of owner-occupation, which some people can bear and others cannot.

Karen Buck: There is an important point in my hon. Friend's comment. Generally speaking, what he has mentioned was not a problem among local authority leaseholders, although it depended a little on where they were. The leaseholders causing me the greatest concern were those who held leases in high rises; it is extremely expensive to carry out decent homes initiative work on high rises. Many other leaseholders, however, were perfectly able to sustain a mortgage on ex-local authority stock in normal times.
	However, there is a genuine issue. Last week in my advice surgery, I met yet again a woman on housing benefit, whoextraordinarilywas allowed to buy her local authority property from Westminster council. I do not understand how anybody could have been complicit in allowing and encouraging people on very low incomessometimes benefit-level incomesto buy their own homes.
	It is also fair to say that the roots of much of the global economic catastrophe with which we are now dealing lie in the American sub-prime mortgage market, in which people who simply had no realistic means of repaying home loans were encouraged to buy. We all have to be careful, however; the issue is not confined to America and it is not just a party political point. We have an understandable desire to support and encourage people into home ownership, but there are people on the margins who should not have been so encouraged.
	That brings me to my core point, which has been mentioned in this debate. I am thinking of the 4 million social tenants and the 4 million or so peoplewho overlap with the former to some extentwho are in a queue for social housing. Fundamentally, the big dividing line in housing policy is now between those of us who believe that social housing is part of the solution and those who believe that it is part of the problem. I say in all fairness that the Government have not built enough social homes; I have never believed that they have, and I am on record as having said that. I am concerned about meeting housing need, and I cannot deny that that is true.
	However, it is also true, although ignored on the Opposition Benches, that the money that we have invested in social housing has been much needed investment in the decent homes initiative. We have rehabilitated and refurbished tens of thousands of homes in my constituency that were long overdue. The investment was made, although I would have preferred it to have been slightly more balanced towards new homes.

Andrew Slaughter: I do not want to correct my hon. Friend, but the situation is worse than that. The Tory council in my constituency tried to give back the decent homes initiative money; it said that it did not want it. Now the councillors involved describe it as an exercise in upgrading the deckchairs on the Titanic. They really do not believe that there is a future for social housing. They think that the 13 billion of decent homes initiative money was wasted.

Karen Buck: My hon. Friend always manages to trump me when it comes to Hammersmith Conservatives; what is going on in that borough is jaw-dropping. He is absolutely right. Sometimes it seems to me that Hammersmith Conservatives make Dame Shirley Porter look like Octavia Hill. My hon. Friend will, no doubt, continue to fight that battle.
	I return to the issue of the dividing line on social housing. The message coming through extremely strongly from the practice in Hammersmith, from the statements made by Westminster council's deputy cabinet member for housing and from many Conservative think-tanks and supporting politicians is that social housing is the fundamental problem. Even the Leader of the Opposition's introduction to Conservative housing policy talks about families being trapped in social housing. The language repeated again and again in such texts implies that tenants are second-class citizens. It equates social housing with deprivation and loss of status. The implication is that tenants should be ashamed. I deplore that, because social housing should be a choice and tenure is not a matter of morality. People in social housing may not be there for life. Obviously, with home ownership being so desirable because of the equity return over the years, many people want to leave their social housing at some point, when they can do so, and enjoy the benefits of home ownership. However, when and while they are tenants, they are not in some way morally inferior because of the exercise of that choice.
	The thrust of the argument emerging from the Conservatives is focused on security of tenure. Tenants everywhere should be very worried about that emerging thinking because, as is well researched and documented, the loss of security of tenure has a devastating effect on communities and on the lives of the people it affects. There is a litany of policy in Conservative thinking that would do untold damage to neighbourhoods and families. It would also lead to additional expenditure being incurred by the public purse, particularly through housing benefit when tenants, whether in social housing or forced into the private sector, have to pay higher rents that must be picked up elsewhere by the public purse.

Jeremy Corbyn: My hon. Friend must be aware from her constituency that the transient nature of communities where the majority of people are in private rented accommodation leads to fractured communities, a diminution of community life, and a less satisfactory form of existence than for those who have security of tenure in council and housing association properties.

Karen Buck: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is exactly why housing associations grew up in the first placeto meet the needs of vulnerable people who were forced into the private rented sector and whose lives were damaged as a result.
	The emerging thinking in the Conservative party is extraordinarily damaging. It threatens market rents for tenants and the loss of security of tenure for tenants. The abandonment of targets and the lack of acknowledgement of the need for social housing, as reflected in the motion, would mean that those people continued to be treated and regarded as second-class citizens, and that their housing needs would not be met. This Government, with their investment programme in the decent homes initiative and an expanded building programme within a continued commitment to affordable accommodation with reasonable rents, have the only solution to the housing pressures that we face.

Several hon. Members: rose

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I advise hon. Members that the winding-up speeches will commence at 9.40 pm. Several Members are hoping to catch my eye; if they do the arithmetic and exercise self-discipline, all may be successful.

Andrew Lansley: I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute briefly to this important debate. I particularly enjoyed hearing the opening speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). There is nothing that I wish to add to or detract from his critique of Government policy and his exposition of our policies.
	My purpose is simply to add some remarks relating specifically to South Cambridgeshire and the application of Government housing policy even in the months still available to them. Much needs to be done by the Government to offset the difficulties that we face in meeting our future housing need. The Minister will be aware that South Cambridgeshire is one of those places where housing need is the most acute, as are the problems of affordability and the house price to earnings ratio. In Cambridgeshire we have never taken the view that we wish to constrain the availability of additional housing supply; we have always actively sought opportunities to match new housing supply to the evident requirement for employment and new housing in our area.
	That is why, five or six years ago, we identified additional housing requirements through the county structure plan. In my constituency, we have given up a great deal of green belt. New developments are happening in Cambourne and in Trumpington Meadows. Through the structure plan, we are committed to the development of Northstowe as a new town of more than 9,500 homes. We have always advocated that. We recognised, after an exhaustive process through the structure plan, that that location was the right place for us to take the next step towards supplying a substantial number of new houses as part of a large increase overall. In my constituency, even on our existing plans, we intended to double the rate of new housing in the next few years.
	It will be no surprise to hon. Members that, in the fourth quarter of last year, much of the impetus simply stopped. It is vital to regain some of that initiative. The Government can do several things to help increase housing supply and provide more affordable and social housing in South Cambridgeshire. Like others, I have witnessed the number of people seeking social housing more than double during my time as a Member of Parliament.
	Some of my hon. Friends have already made the point, so I will not go on about it, that in South Cambridgeshire and Cambridge city, more than 11 million disappears in negative subsidy on the housing revenue accountsomething approaching 40 per cent. of the rental income in South Cambridgeshire. By the measure of housing need, which is the starting point for negative subsidy, we clearly have dramatically rising needs. We also need social housing and I therefore urge Ministers to act quickly to enable us in South Cambridgeshire and in Cambridge city to respond to the dramatic housing need by retaining more resources to improve our existing housing stock and add to it.
	Secondly, let me consider Northstowe. The new Minister for Housing told us nothing about the Government's plans for eco-towns in South Cambridgeshire. Despite all our efforts to offer additional sites for major new developments, the Government wanted to wish an eco-town upon us. We said that it was in the wrong place, there was no infrastructure to support it and that it was environmentally unsustainable. The Government wanted to go ahead, we fought and, in the space of several months last year, we defeated the proposal. It went away and I hope that it does not come back. We in Cambridgeshire will decide where best to support new housing supply.
	However, I stress to Ministers that, during the discussion last year with the Minister's predecessor but one, we made it clear that we wanted Northstowe in my constituency to be the first eco-town. In July 2007, just after the Prime Minister took office, one of his first proposals, which he set out in  The Sunday Times, was to build eco-towns. The example that he gave was described as Oakington in Cambridgeshire. Oakington, which is in my constituency, is the location of the planned new town of Northstowe. We want it to be an eco-town, an exemplar and the first new town of its kind in this country. We want it to go ahead, but that will not happen at the moment. Gallagher, the developer, has backed out and the proposal depends on the Homes and Communities Agency, with Government backing, being prepared to turn it into the first exemplary eco-town. I urge Ministers who are taking on their new responsibilities to consider positively how we can make Northstowe the first eco-town.
	If we are to take a rational approach to providing additional housing, the Government must remove from the regional spatial strategy in the east of England the specification that the housing targets are a minimum. If we carry on as we are, with little new housing being built, opportunistic developers will try to claim that, because we are not on track to meet the housing target in the regional spatial strategy, they can make highly speculative proposals for new house building in highly unsuitable locations at some unspecified time in the future. We will end up with an enormous overhang of designations for new housing in the wrong places, whereas local authorities should decide, with local people's support, where that new housing should be built, with the necessary infrastructure support. I urge Ministers to reject that misuse of language in the regional spatial strategy, which drives that bad effect.

Phyllis Starkey: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley), who made a thoughtful contribution and some points that deserve consideration. It was very different from the contribution from the Conservative Front Bench. I agree with the hon. Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather), who has now left, that that was vacuous. Indeed, in my view parts of it were positively dangerous.
	I want to focus on a couple of the points in the Conservative motion, because it is important that we rebut them. First, the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) spoke from the Front Bench about the take-up of the mortgage support scheme and the mortgage rescue scheme, as well as the homebuy schemes. His comments were essentially debating points and party political point scoring, and did not give a realistic assessment of the reality of the situation.
	I would point the hon. Gentleman to the interesting evidence that the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government heard from the Council of Mortgage Lenders and the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association. They said that it was far too soon to judge the success or otherwise of the two schemes to support people facing repossession, because of the time that it takes for people to get through to the end point. The famous two households at the end of the MRS involved individuals whose houses have been bought by a council or a housing association.
	The CML and the IMLA both made the point that those schemes are actually about preventing repossession. Much of the benefit achieved by both schemes, including the one that was introduced as recently as April, has been in encouraging those who are experiencing difficulties to approach their lenders straight away. Regrettably, in the past, people having difficulty with their mortgages tended to put their heads in the sand and hope that the problem would go away. They would build up huge arrears and at that point there would be repossessions. The evidence from both of the current schemes is that many people are going to their lenders first and that lenders are exercising forbearancealthough partly out of self-interest.
	Lenders have realised that it costs a lot for a mortgage company to repossess a propertyabout 35,000 to 37,000and there is not a lot of point in doing that in the current circumstances, because they would not be able to sell the property and recoup any losses. Lenders have been persuaded, partly in their own self-interest and partly because of the pressures put on them by central Government, that they should exercise forbearance, come to an agreement with their borrowers and use all possible measures to maintain people in their homes, thereby avoiding reaching the end of the process and having to get the council or a housing association to buy a property.
	Simply to cite the figures for how many people reach the end of the process, as the hon. Gentleman did, is to make a debating point. It shows that he does not give two hoots about the individuals involved and does not want to have a constructive debateand the same goes for his comments about the other mortgage scheme.  [ Interruption. ] I notice that the hon. Gentleman is closing his ears, obviously because this is uncomfortable to hear, which will be interesting for everybody out therenot those in the Public Gallery, because there are not many there now, but for everybody who reads  Hansard tomorrow. They will realise that the Opposition spokesperson is now chatting to the person next to him, because he does not want to hear the debatewhich, if I may say so, also demonstrates his contempt for Parliament, as there is little point in having a debate if people do not listen to the contributions of others.
	The second point in the Conservatives' motion, which nobody has even alluded to, is the ridiculous suggestion, which the Opposition constantly make, that it is the Government's planning guidance on housing that has led to a glut of flats. There are two reasons why there are so many flats in city centres. The first reason is that local councils have not used their planning powers properly and have allowed planning applications to go through. The second reason is that developers make more money if they pack lots of tiny flats on to a small site.
	Opposition spokespeople frequently suggest that the reason why there are so many flats is the Government's rules on increasing the density of housing. Actually, the density of flats in city centres is many times higher than that set out in the guidance on density provided by the Government. The reason why flats are being built is that developers want to make the maximum profit, and that is what flats give them. Previously, they were able to sell the flats and get their money back. Supine councils do not make proper use of the planning powers that they already have to draw up proper local development frameworks that would allow them to refuse planning applications in the first place. It is ridiculous for the Opposition constantly to blame the Government's density requirements and to pretend that local councils have no responsibility in the matter.
	That brings me to the points that an Opposition worth their salt should have been making today, because there are some things that the Government need to do more of in order to address the problems before us. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), who is obsessed with regulation, made the astonishing point that he could not understand why house prices were falling even though housing need still exceeded housing supply. That is happening because there is no mortgage money. House prices, regrettably, do not respond to people's need; they respond to people's ability to compete for a scarce resource, which bears almost no relation to people's need for housing. Regrettably, many people who need housing do not have the financial resources to express that need economically.
	In order to enable more people to gain access to the housing market, we need to free up mortgage finance. That is not within the gift of the Department for Communities and Local Government; it is within the gift of the Treasury. Some very reasonable complaints were raised in the Select Committee about the asset-backed securities guarantee scheme. I cannot go into the technicalities now, but I refer the Minister to the transcript of the evidence. Clearly, certain things need to be done to tinker with that scheme in order to get mortgage finance flowing more freely. That would help shared ownership and shared equity schemes, in particular, and enable people to express their housing need economically.
	The Government are taking certain steps to try to get the housing market moving again. Evidence was given to the Select Committee by the two lenders as well as by the National Housing Federation and the Home Builders Federation, representing the housing associations and the builders. All those groupings said that the Government were doing the right thing, but not enough of it, and that more money should be made available for the schemes. In relation to the asset-backed securities guarantee scheme in particular, they said that it was not just a question of more money, but that the Treasury should be prepared to take greater financial risks. I urge the Government to consider that idea.
	The major criticism that the Opposition have made of the Government's steps to cushion businesses and home owners from the effects of this recession is that we are spending too much money, that we have borrowed too much, and that we should be borrowing and spending less. That is at complete variance with what was said by all those who gave evidence to the Select Committee. They said that, if anything, the Government should be borrowing and spending more now in order to try to restart house building, to keep the construction industry going and to ensure that the people whom we represent, and care deeply about, can gain access to the housing that they need at a price that they can afford, either to buy or to rent.
	I therefore urge the Government to consider increasing their spending even more, because if we do not spend that money now, the cost that society will subsequently have to bear of the lost opportunity to keep the house building industry going will be immense, as will the cost to the people whom we represent, because more families will have to live for longer in unsatisfactory and overcrowded accommodation. Those costs will be borne by future generations.

Robert Syms: Housing is an important subject for many of our constituents, and I therefore welcome this opportunity to make a small contribution to the debate tonight. I have raised questions on a number of occasions about the housing revenue account and the negative subsidy. I do not pretend that there is an elegant or easy answer to this complex and difficult question, but many areas of the country are contributing substantial sums of money, which is having a big impact on rents and on the ability of housing authorities and arm's length management organisations to deliver a service. It is not necessarily coming from the leafier or more prosperous areas of the UK. There are areas such as Bolsover and Chesterfieldand even areas such as Barking and Dagenham in outer Londonthat have major housing problems, but are contributing to the pot. The Government need to come up with some kind of long-term solution, so that authorities contributing a lot of money can plan and perhaps provide some additional housing stockor at least spend money on reducing the voids.
	More importantly, when I talked to the Poole housing partnership, I found that it welcomed the decent homes standard and the money spent on housing stock. It also said, however, that if it had to continue paying the massive sums of money levied, it might not be able to maintain the housing stock in the long term. It might then have to look at some alternative arrangement and become more like a housing association. That would be a pity, because its satisfaction rates are very high. It is empowering tenants, teaching them to do all sorts of things like use computers and helping them with advice on how to deal with debt. The relative income levels of council tenants in my Poole constituency are surprisingly low, so there is a real need, as house prices are very high and social housing is going to take a major part of the strain.
	As I said, there is no easy solution, but there is a problem. Many Government Back Benchers have realised that at the current rate of increase, it will not be many years before as much as 1 billion will be raised from tenants' rents and then redistributed to other areas. The Minister said earlier that he would soon come up with a solution; we certainly need one soon.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) referred to home information packs, which were debated in connection with the Housing Bill. When we raised the question of what happens with these packs, which are time limited, if people do not sell their homes, the Minister always assured us that everything would be swept up when the home was eventually soldbut if someone puts their house up for sale in the current housing market and it does not sell for a while, they might have to provide two or three packs, with attendant costs and consequences. An argument for HIPs might be made in a booming economy, but in a housing market that is extremely sticky and likely to remain so for a while, they are an additional burdensome cost for people trying to sell their homes. They have become an impediment, so if my party gains the confidence of the British people and forms the next Government, it will repeal the HIPs as an important element in the strategy for housing market recovery.
	I think that the Homes and Communities Agency is a welcome development. In the current economic situation, it will play a major and important role in kick-starting some developments that have fallen by the wayside. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) mentioned the agency in the context of Cambridgeshire.
	Clearly, the Government are doing some good things, but what they have done in other respects is surprising. If someone had asked me in 1997 how many social housing units I thought the Government would provide during their term in office, I would have said, Well, this is a Labour Government, so they'll provide a lot of social housing. I know that decent homes standards was their priority, but the reality is that the Government's record on building council housing and other forms of social housing has been remarkably poor. The hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) often makes his point with a degree of force and common sense. The result is that fewer houses are available for those who need them.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) mentioned armed forces housing. I welcome the recent legislative change to allow members of the armed forces to count for something on housing lists. That is rather a good thing.
	The overall housing situation is one of great difficulty. I agree with the Minister that fewer people are currently losing their homes. Given that we have a crash market, many lenders are being sensitive and sensible in their dealings with people, but that is not because of Government policy. As we heard earlier, Government policy has not achieved an awful lot. The Council of Mortgage Lenders has always said that provided that people who are in trouble tell lenders honestly that they are in trouble, it may well be possible to work out a solution. I welcome that.
	As I said during the economic debate the other day, I am not very pessimistic about the long term. I am pessimistic about our levels of debt, but I am not pessimistic about the British economy. I think that it will grow next year. Given the amount of money that the Government have spent, the devaluation and the reduction in interest rates, it would be very surprising if things did not start to move. In the light of some of the initial figures that we are seeing, I think it legitimate to say that the position is stabilising, and will probably improve next year.
	I hope that that will cause the housing market to stabilise as well. One of the big differences between the situation today and the situation in the early 1990s is the substantial level of personal debt among households. We know that unemployment will rise, although we pray that it will not rise by too much. People who lose their jobs, who do not receive help with their mortgages for quite some time, and who have credit card debts and other loans, will very quickly find themselves in financial trouble.
	Finally, let me point out to the Minister that Dudley is one of the authorities that make a major contribution in the form of negative housing subsidy, and that that issue needs to be considered. We need a formula, which may have to be a compromise. Clearly funds cannot be taken out of central London overnight, but we need some way of getting through the current circumstances. We should ensure that authorities such as the Poole housing partnership can plan, maintain their independence and provide a good service, but we should also have a needs-based housing formula.

Jeremy Corbyn: I welcome the debate, and congratulate both Ministers on their appointments. I look forward to hearing what the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Austin), has to say in response to the debate.
	I have the privilege of representing an inner-city community where housing is an enormous issue. Only 30 per cent. of my constituents are owner-occupiers; the rest occupy council, housing association or privately rented properties. The levels of deprivation and overcrowding are extremely serious. I compliment the Government on the amount of money they have given us to establish decent homes standards, improvements in community areas on estates and better estate managementthat has been a huge step forward and a welcome developmentbut there are still many people on the housing waiting list, many who cannot even get on to the housing waiting list, and many on the internal transfer list.
	The knock-on effects of overcrowding in producing poor health, under-achievement in education and all the other social breakdown issues are often directly related to housing. We all know of families who are experiencing hard times because of overcrowding, but when such families are given decent houses or flats, everything suddenly starts to look a great deal better. I believe that weGovernment and local authoritiesmust do everything possible to improve the housing situation.
	In London as a whole, 200,000 families are living in overcrowded accommodation and 50,000 are living in temporary accommodation. Those figures are horrendous by any stretch of the imagination. The position can be dealt with only through a combination of policies, including a large amount of public investment in housing for people in desperate need.
	While I understand why the Government are so sensitive about the issues of home ownership and mortgages, I feel that, since the 1950s, the country has developed an obsession with home ownership, often at the expense of social rented accommodation. There is an obsessive belief that everyone should aspire to home ownership, while council housing is seen as the housing of last resort. I should love to see people being given a genuine choice between renting and buying, with no social stigma attached to not owning a home.
	No other country in Europe has become involved in home ownership to the same degree, and no other country in Europe has the same levels of excessive personal debtlargely because of home ownership, or because of the ability to borrow against what were perceived to be permanently rising house values and all the problems that accompanied that. I believe that we should take a rain check, and think it all through a bit more.
	Both the Minister and the Conservative Front Bencher are new to their posts so I am sure they will find it difficult to answer all the points raised, but I would be grateful if they tried to deal with some of them. The latest Government statement on house spending includes the allocation of 100 million for new council development. That is very good news, but it will not build many homes. Although 100 million might sound like a lot of money, council places in London cost about 100,000 per unit to develop. That allocation is a very good start, but we have to go a lot further, and a lot faster. We must also recognise that one problem is that, because of the Tory Government's policies in the 1980s of pushing sales of council properties and compulsory competitive tendering for council services, local authorities currently do not have enough skilled architects, planners and all the other expertise required to develop a housing programme, as that has either been sold off or gone away.
	Over the past few years in London, it has generally been housing associations that have developed new housingthat is also the case in most other parts of the country. The Minister needs to look at a number of issues in this regard, such as the relationship between housing associations and the Homes and Communities Agency, and the possibility of zoning them because there are some highly inefficient housing associations with large numbers of properties scattered over a huge area and the on-costs of managing them are very high. The housing associations are aware of that, and some of them are undertaking sensible transfers to bring about more efficient management. We also need to look at the democratic running of housing associations, because there is a degree of accountability for council tenants and leaseholders as they can get hold of a councillor or council official, but I do not find the same degree of accountability in some housing associations. Some are exemplary, but others are truly awful in their management methods and their tenants' representation methods, and we need to be tougher with them. They are not private companies; they are handling very large sums of public money and dealing with housing applicants who are nominated to them by local housing authorities.
	I started my contribution by pointing out that in my constituency, as in most in London, the fastest growing sector is the private rented sector. In an intervention on the Minister I made the point that my local authority, like many others, now routinely nominates people to the private rented sector because there are no council or housing association places for those in desperate housing need. The rent deposit is paid by the local authority, and housing benefit pays for the rent; and the rent levels are astronomical. I could give many examples of flats in the same council block where, for example, one is council-owned and is paid for by housing benefit of 100 a week and the other has been bought under the right to buy and then rented out on the private market at 300 a week, which is also paid for by housing benefit. The amount of public money we are pouring into the pockets of private landlords is ludicrous; the total is several billions per year in London. The total housing benefit bill in London is about 4 billion; I do not know the exact breakdown between the public and private sectors, but I am sure the unit cost of private rented accommodation is much higher. In the short term, there is not a lot we can do about that, as the private rented sector is providing housing for people, but rent controls in the private sector would prevent profiteering. Above all, we should provide far more places built to a decent standard, because I am shocked and appalled by the conditions of the private rented accommodation in which many people are placed at present.
	Members' work at our advice surgeries has made us all armchair experts on housing allocation policies. People come to us and say, I'd like to get a house as we're a bit overcrowded. I look up and ask, Any illness in the family? They reply, Not much, so I say, How much? What's wrong with you? When they tell me, I say, Yes, that sounds bad. We go through the whole process, and then I might think that they will get a few more medical, overcrowding or sharing points. There is an entire science involved. I wish that that science did not exist; I wish it was not necessary. Within that science, we endlessly change what the priorities are, and two groups of people, at opposite ends of the scale, lose out. First, most local authorities have long since ceased to house single people unless they are either very vulnerable or desperately ill. There are many very aggrieved single people in their 20s and 30s who have chosen to lead a single lifethat is their lifestyle choicebut have no chance of getting local authority housing. They have no chance of buying because their salaries are not high enough and they even find it difficult to go into shared ownership. We need to examine the lifestyle choices that people are making and start to reflect them a bit more. Let us move to the other end of the scale. The building programmes of local authorities, housing associations and private sector developers are all ignoring large familiesthey do exist. We need family-sized housing to be constructed as part of the entire development programme.
	Lastly, the Minister has doubtless been made aware of and fully understands all the issues associated with council housing and its finance. He has had plenty of time to get his head round that, having been in the job a whole day.

Ian Austin: Half a day.

Jeremy Corbyn: It takes but an hour.
	There are major issues to address. We must review the housing finance system to end what is, in effect, the taxation of council tenants and ensure that the money is fed back to meet the needs of people on housing waiting lists. It should also go back into maintenance and support systems for existing housing stock and into ending the discrimination against council tenants who have freely made a choice not to undertake a stock transfer to a housing association and not to become part of an arm's length management organisation. They should receive public sector support in exactly the same way as anybody else does.
	I wish the Ministers well in their new positions. If we do not solve the housing crisis, the horrors of the rise of the far right and of the British National party, and the destruction of so many people's lives because of bad health, educational under-achievement and family break-up, will continue. It is our duty to conquer the housing crisis in this country.

Nadine Dorries: I congratulate the Minister on his new role. I thought he was still a Whip and had got lost, so I was delighted to learn that he has been promoted, and I hope he does very well.
	I benefited from right to buy, without which my family would still be living on a Liverpool council estate. When I canvass the housing association areas in my constituency, people always say to me, We love living here and we love our house. We wish we could buy it. We wish it was ours and we could pay for it ourselves. I wanted to make that point before going on to discuss eco-towns. Perhaps the Minister will respond by outlining the Government's thinking, and what his thinking is as a new Minister, on right to buy. Will that be made available again?
	Will the Minister clarify the position on eco-towns? My constituency was targeted to have an eco-town of 20,000 new homes. There was no rhyme or reason to the proposed site of the eco-town. It was in the middle of green fields, next to a lake, in a valley; it was nowhere near any infrastructure, hospitals, doctors, shops, rail networks, public transport or road networks. The proposal was to put the eco-town in the middle of the local beauty spot and that made no sense. As far as my constituents are aware, that project has died a death, but will the Minister confirm that? Can the people of Mid-Bedfordshire say goodbye to the eco-town?
	I would like to inform the Minister of a positive effect that the eco-town proposal had for Mid-Bedfordshire: it made residents very aware of the dangers presented by Government house building targets. My constituents realised that the Government could allocate a target and an area and they would have very little say in what was built, how it would look, where it was positioned, how large it would be and whether it would serve any useful purpose. That energised my constituents. I have harnessed that energy and made good use of it, and at a large public meeting we formed a constituency-wide housing committee; another meeting is to take place in September.
	We have formed three more committees from that one: a central planning committee to identify where we think housing is needed and should go, the type of housing it should be and the local needs it should meet; a tourism committee, because we would like the growth development targets in Mid-Bedfordshire to be met through tourism; and an environmental committee to examine the impact of housing on the area. The three committees will all report to the central Westminster forum, and we will feed that information into the new Central Bedfordshire authority.
	The reason we are doing that is that, as I am sure the Minister is aware, the East of England regional assembly recently published a report in which it stated, having talked to developers, that there should be up to 120,000 additional homes placed in Mid-Bedfordshire. Given that we have only 77,000 homes at the moment, that is an incredible number of homes, and it would more than double the number in the area. As one can imagine, many residents were alarmed about that.
	One reason for our alarm was that we sit between Luton and Bedford. I do not know whether the Minister has been to either area, but both are desperately in need of inward investment and urban regeneration. The hospitals, Bedford hospital and the Luton and Dunstable hospital, are based there. The main employers are based in those areas, and they have good public transport, good road and rail links and good bus routes. There are good schools, which are not full, as those in my constituency are. There are doctors' practices there, whereas there are no places on doctors' waiting lists in Mid-Bedfordshire. There are dentists, whereas there are no dentists in Mid-Bedfordshire.
	Both Luton and Bedford have large numbers of people who need social housing or are on housing association waiting lists. They have employment and they live in the areas that need investment in housing. Yet, for some reason, the Government have decided that the housing should be placed in Mid-Bedfordshire, between those two areas but with no bus routes, no links, no employment and no infrastructure.
	I ask the Minister to let us know why, if he feels that Bedfordshire needs such a high density of housing, it is not appropriate to put that housing in the areas where the people in Bedfordshire are screaming out for it rather than in an area that is mainly agricultural and has no employment and no employers looking to move in. One housing proposal that was halfway through being built in Wixams has been blanketed, and the developers have walked away from it. It is not now being built, for the reasons that I have highlighted. Nobody is interested in the homes, because there is no employment. Can the Minister please inform me why he is not looking at the areas that need the houses to be built?
	We are not nimbyist in Bedfordshire. We are not saying, No building in our backyard, we don't need any. Of course we do. We have a population that is growing at such a rate that we need homes, including social housing, but nowhere near 120,000 homes. As one can imagine, that is an alarming figure, and that is why our committee has been set up and is feeding into the new Central Bedfordshire authority, which I am sure will challenge those figures and challenge the Government head-on.
	I should like to finish, as another Member wishes to speak, but first I return to the eco-town. As the Minister knows, there were problems with the sustainability of the proposed town. No decision could be taken about whether it should be targeted at sustainability level 4 or level 5, and what would happen by 2020 when it was built and fully developed. Those are huge problems, and if the Minister answers none of my other questions I hope that he at least can confirm that the eco-town proposal in Mid-Bedfordshire is dead. Is that the last that we will see of it? That is important information for the residents, and for the committee that was formed because they were energised by that unwanted proposal, to take into account in our proposals to the Central Bedfordshire authority.

Bob Russell: I am grateful to colleagues for listening to Madam Deputy Speaker's requests to keep speeches short so that everybody can take part in this debate.
	In welcoming the new Minister for Housing to his inaugural debate, I could not help but note his telling observation that our homes matter more than anything else. That is obviously true, but if people do not have a home, or if where they are living is not adequate for their family's needs, the observation is an empty statement that means nothing. Unless people have a decent home, they cannot say that their homes matter more than anything else.
	The 2009 Budget will barely make a dent in the 1.8 million households estimated to be on the waiting list for housing. The 100 million for council house building will produce fewer than 1,000 houses. Some 400,000 children live in poverty, so the Government's pledges in Every Child Matters are meaningless if those children have nowhere decent to live.
	It is not often that I am almost moved to tears, because I have been around long enough to see neglect and poverty before. But we are now in the third millennium in the fourth or fifth richest country in the world. Short of failure to defend the realm, the biggest sin that any Government can commit is to fail to house our people. The Government of Clement Attlee were recovering from war, but they managed to build council houses. Successive Conservative and Labour Governments also managed to do so for some 45 years. The record shows that Conservative Governments built marginally more council houses than Labour Governmentsthere was almost a race to see who could build the most. Some 25 years ago, housing shortages had virtually ended and, in my town, there was no such thing as bed-and-breakfast accommodation for the homeless.
	When Ministers tell the House that bed-and-breakfast accommodation has ended, they are wrong. I was nearly brought to tears by the sight of three little girls, aged two, four and six, running around the waiting room at my advice surgery. They had done nothing wrong. Whatever problems their parents may have had that put them in bed and breakfastthey are now on their second B and B, in Ipswich, having been exiled to Suffolk, even though the girls' school is in Colchesterthe children have done nothing wrong. The cost of keeping that family in bed and breakfast is considerably greater than if they had been allowed to stay in their housing association house, even though rent arrears had accrued. That would have been cheaper and it would not have destroyed the familyI fear that the next step will be for the children to be taken into care. I hope that that does not happen.
	The last two lines of the Liberal Democrat amendment, which can be found on the Order Paper, would have been standard Conservative and Labour party policy throughout the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s. They refer to the need to
	invest in a large-scale homebuilding programme to address the crisis in social housing which disproportionately impacts on the most vulnerable.
	If we insert the word council for social, hon. Members will know exactly where I am coming from.
	The hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) made a powerful speech, with which I agreed. The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) referred to rural housing. I represent an urban constituency, but the consequences of the failure to provide council housing in villages that would enable the next generation of the indigenous population to live there mean that families are quite often driven into the nearest towns, where the housing problems are then exacerbated.
	Reference has been made to empty dwellings in both the private and public sector. In fact, there is sometimes not a housing shortage but rather a mismatch because there are so many empty dwellings. In my constituency, the garrison town of Colchester, there are in excess of 200 empty family houses on the Army estate owned not by the Ministry of Defence but by Annington Homes, because the Conservative Government privatised them. The public purse is paying 3,500 a year for every one of those houses to stand empty. What a great tragedy it is that one of these houses could not be made available for the family of the three little girls who are in bed and breakfast in Ipswich. A compassionate Government would do something about that. I ask the Minister and his ministerial team to make urgent inquiries into why those 200 empty dwellings in my constituency cannot be brought back into public use, when the public purse is paying to allow them to stand empty.

Nadine Dorries: The hon. Gentleman mentioned 200 homes owned by Aragon Housing Association. When we have such situations in my constituency, I go to see Aragon, we discuss the problems and they are usually resolved. In my experience, it is a good housing association. Does the hon. Gentleman not feel that he could do something about that himself?

Bob Russell: I would never use the words good housing association to describe Annington Homes. I can assure the hon. Lady that the experience of Annington Homes in my constituency for serving members of Her Majesty's armed forces and for those who have bought houses that Annington Homes has sold on to the private sector would not lead me to describe it as a good housing association.
	Let me conclude on the question of the Homes and Communities Agency and housing associations. During the course of this debate, I tried to add up the total number of housing associations in my constituency. I got to 10, plus Colchester Borough Homes. Is it not time that we had a rationalisation of housing associations in different areas? The majority of these housing associations do not have any local management. As I am sure that we all know from our advice bureaux, if management is not local, there is a danger that antisocial problems will arise. I urge the new ministerial team to implore the HCA to rationalise the housing associations so that there are fewer housing associations in each location and to provide on-site supervision or management at least within the borough or district.

Justine Greening: This is the second housing debate that we have had in nearly as many months. Despite what has been said by Government Members, our first debate focused on the important issue of social housing but we felt that there was more to talk about, as housing is such a vital issue for our party. We therefore wanted to hold a second debate today, in our Opposition time, to highlight the many major issues affecting housing in England. In fact, we called this debate to represent the real concerns and difficulties in respect of housing that are faced by millions of people in Britainthe first-time buyers finding it almost impossible to get on to the housing ladder, the home owners struggling to pay their mortgages and stay in their homes, and the families stranded in overcrowded houses or whose names lie on forgotten waiting lists. Above all, the underlying problem that Ministers never want to talk about is the present depressed rate of house building. As of 2008, it has been lower in every year of this Administration than it was in even the worst years of the Major or Thatcher Governments.
	The people we represent face uncertainty and anxiety about whether they will get a home or keep the one that they have. If their circumstances change and they have to move, they are worried about whether they can remain in housing that meets their needs. Yet again, Ministers have talked a good game today about tackling housing issuesas ever, we have a lot of warm wordsbut I am afraid that the delivery has been sadly lacking. In both the good times and the bad times in our economy, there have been a series of failed schemes, headline-grabbing initiatives and misguided policies. The result is that Britain's housing is in a very sorry state indeed.
	Concerns have been raised by hon. Members of all parties about what is happening in their constituencies. The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) talked about the challenges faced by leaseholders, and she pointed out that we must make sure that our desire to enable people to get on to the housing ladder is implemented in a sustainable way. That was a fair point to raise.
	The hon. Lady doubted the Opposition's commitment to social housing, but I assure her that we would not have devoted two debates to housing if we did not recognise how important the topic was. We may have debates about policy, but we would not spend time listening to the concerns expressed by hon. Members in this House and by people out in the country if we did not recognise the importance of the issue. As a prospective Government in waiting, my party must be able to give people a proper alternative whenever the next election is held, and that means that we must have an informed policy on housing.
	We also heard from a number of Opposition Members in the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) said that communities can come up with good suggestions about where housing should go. He said that people will take responsibility for discussing how their housing needs can be met, and my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) made a similar point.
	Unfortunately, the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) is not in his place, but he made some very fair points in expressing his concerns about housing associations. He spoke about the need to make sure that they are accountable to the tenants whom they look after, and he made some thoughtful observations about housing waiting lists and the housing allocation priorities that local authorities constantly have to juggle.
	I am sure that we can all relate to what the hon. Gentleman said, but the problem underlying everything is the fact that the amount of our housing stock is so constrained. That is why we have to keep coming back to the Government's lack of delivery on housing. They have been in office for 12 years now, so we cannot say, Well, it may get better in a few years. All the evidence suggests that there is something fundamentally flawed in the Government's approach to housing policy, as otherwise more houses would have been built before now.
	We know that people are finding it hard to get on to the property ladder, as the number of first-time buyers fell to an estimated 300,000 in 2007, compared to 500,000 10 years before. There are also real concerns about sustainability: in 2007, nearly one mortgage in 10 was for 100 per cent. or more, and the problem is made worse by the lack of house building. On average, 23,000 fewer homes have been built every year under this Government, and housing starts this year are at their lowest since the 1920s. Social housing is beset with problems, too. As we heard, there are 1.8 million people on the waiting list. That is the consequence of a steady lack of house building in Britain over the past 12 years.
	That is compounded by the fact that people who have accommodation often find it unsuitable. We have 560,000 households living in overcrowded conditions in England, and 200,000 of those households are right here in London. I am sure that many London MPs who participated in the debate today see those people in their surgeries every day. It is difficult to discuss their problems because of the underlying fact that not enough new housing is being built to give them a chance of having a home that meets their needs.
	We spoke about the people who own their home but are struggling to stay in it. Repossession claims have soared from 67,000 a year in 1997 to a staggering 143,000 repossessions in 2008. The Government have talked the talk about how to help these people, but the mortgage rescue scheme that the Government launched has helped just two people. Ministers may say that it will take time for the scheme to produce results, but that was not the message last year when it was launched. Expectations have been badly let down by the scheme.
	There has been a range of failed housing policies, such as home information packs, which add cost to the sale process and stifle the supply to the market. Only today, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said that it thought that HIPs had held back the market. As we heard, we still have no definition of a zero-carbon home. The Treasury has given tax relief on 18 homes, but the Department for Communities and Local Government does not know how to define them. Only under a Labour Government could one Department have a definition and another say that there is no definition.
	We heard about eco-towns, a complete disaster project that ran into the sands because local people said no. We know that green issues are important to people throughout the country, yet when it came to smuggling in eco-towns through house building in inappropriate places, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) pointed out, local communities will not have it. They want Whitehall to work with them and give them the responsibility for deciding where the extra housing will be. They do not want the top-down targets that the Government have given them.
	Let us not forget the disaster of the botched announcement on stamp duty last summer. We have not talked about that today, but if the housing market was under strain up until then, the Chancellor managed to stagnate it with that botched announcement and totally dried up the market in a way that would have been hard to achieve if someone had had to sit down and think about it as a challenge, but the Chancellor managed it.
	The range and gravity of housing problems under the present Government and the Department are clear to see. Fewer houses are being built, and there is greater overcrowding, growing waiting lists, falling home ownership and rising repossessions. The Government's record on housing is reflected in the chaos that we have seen over the past week in the Communities and Local Government team. The Housing Minister has gone. The Communities Secretary has gone. Even the Under-Secretaries were moved. They are not here today to defend their record on housing, but given the Government's history of decisions in this area, perhaps leaving their team was the one good decision that they have made so far.
	We cannot go on as we are. We can tackle the issues that we have been debating todayget rid of home information packs, take nine of 10 first-time buyers out of stamp duty, get rid of the top-down targets set through the regional spatial strategy, and have local housing trusts that make sure that local communities can decide for themselves how much new housing they have and where it is located. However, we will not resolve any of these important matters until we have a general election. We have had 12 years of failed housing policy. It is time to give the British people the general election that they so desperately need. Then we can have a Conservative Government who can deliver the sort of housing policy that will make a real difference to families throughout the country.

Ian Austin: I thank Opposition Members for welcoming me and my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing to our new positions. This evening's debate has been a very useful early induction for both of us, not least because it has been such a good debate among Members in all parts of the House.
	Despite the disappointment about the changes, to which the Opposition's motion refers, I am delighted to be doing this job, because for many people their homes are not just their greatest asset but their greatest source of security and a strong foundation on which so much else depends: good health, getting a job, building a career, fulfilling potential at school and being part of a community. My predecessor as Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright), made a similar point in a similar debate several months ago, when he said that housing brings safety, security, community cohesion, health, life chances, prosperity and a host of other issues. I pay tribute to the work that he did and welcome all contributions that all Members have made today.
	My right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing rightly set out this Government's impressive housing record, which the motion before us entirely ignored. He set out also our efforts to maintain and build on that record, despite the difficult economic circumstances. We have been proactive and decisive, learning from the experience of the 1990s about the consequences of delay and inaction. Although the motion finds fault in a number of our policies, it fails to propose any alternative. The Opposition obviously want to criticise our record on housing supply, because that is what they are there for, but they do not tell us that this Government's efforts led to the highest levels of house building in 30 years in 2007-08.
	The Opposition's motion also neglects to mention the 110,000 households that have been helped into shared ownership and shared equity through our programmes, and the 29 billion that we have invested since 1997 to bring more than 1 million social rented homes up to scratch. The Opposition also failed to mention the significant strides that we have made on homelessness, rough sleeping and temporary accommodation: statutory homelessness decreased by 60 per cent. between 2003 and 2008; rough sleeping has fallen by 74 per cent.; the number of households in temporary accommodation is down by 33 per cent.; and we have ended the long-term use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for families with children.
	That is an impressive track record. Every previous Housing Minister should be very proud of it, and we are committed to building on it. That is why we have acted proactively and decisively in the economic downturn to help people at risk of repossession, first-time buyers and the construction industry. Our priority has been to help those in financial difficulties to stay in their homes wherever possible, which contrasts with the 1990s, when the Government failed to act while people lost their homes.
	My right hon. Friend spoke about the wide range of measures that we have introducedto strengthen universal support and to bring in specific schemesand, as a result, the Council of Mortgage Lenders is now expected to revise downwards its forecasts of repossessions. Although our critics clearly want to focus on the number of households at the final stages of specific schemes, they do not want to talk about the real help that families are receiving. Lenders covering 80 per cent. of the market either have signed up to the home owner mortgage support scheme or offer their own comparative arrangements. Thousands of families are getting free advice from their local councils every month and lenders now have to prove to the courts that they have exhausted all other options before seeking to repossess.
	We have also introduced new support, in the light of the restricted global supply of credit, to help first-time buyers get a foot on the housing ladder. We have also increased the availability of shared equity schemes and introduced a new rent first, buy later scheme. Demand for our existing schemes remains high.

John Hayes: Will the Minister give way?

Ian Austin: I shall be responding to the points that were made by those people who were present for the whole debate.
	There were more than 6,000 sales under the open market homebuy scheme in 2008-09, and from the experience of the 1990s we know how destructive an economic downturn can be for the construction industry. We cannot afford to make the same mistakes twice, so we have put in place a comprehensive package of support: 1 billion at the Budget; buying up unsold stock from developers; bringing forward funding for affordable housing, including higher grant rates where needed; and the new kick-start fund to get faltering schemes going again. My right hon. Friend clearly demonstrated the scale of the Government's efforts to reduce the damage of the downturn on households and the construction industry now and in the future.
	I shall now turn to the specific points that were made in the debate. My hon. Friend

Justine Greening: Will the Minister give way?

Ian Austin: My hon. Friend the Member for

Justine Greening: Will the Minister give way?

Ian Austin: Go on then.

Justine Greening: Housing starts are at their lowest level since the 1920s; who does the Minister think is responsible for that? Is it the fault of his Government's failed policy, or of the construction industry?

Ian Austin: I will deal with that point in due course, but the point that I wanted to make related to my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck), who spoke with great eloquence about the impact on families who face repossession, and the position of leaseholders. I congratulate her on the work that she is doing to protect her constituents from a local Conservative council, whose policies were set out in great detail.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey), the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, speaking with a knowledge and expertise that few in the House can match, made a fascinating contribution and a devastating critique of the Opposition's case. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn), who has made himself an expert on housing issues, made a thoughtful speech about the state of the housing market and the need to remove the stigma attached to rented housing.  [Interruption.] I shall move on to the questions asked by the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), if I may, but first I point out that my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North and the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) asked questions about the housing association movement. We have set up a new regulator for social housing, the Tenant Services Authority, which will drive improvements in standards and place tenants at the heart of regulation. It will also have a wider range of powers to intervene when things go wrong.
	The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield raised a number of questions about the impact of the Government schemes. He asked how many additional lenders had confirmed that they were signing up to the home owner mortgage support scheme. I can tell him that Lloyds bank, Northern Rock, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Bradford  Bingley, Cumberland building society and others signed up to the scheme at its launch. He will be interested to hear that a number of others have confirmed that they will offer the scheme as soon as possible, including the Bank of Ireland, GMAC RFC, GE Money and others. There is no cut-off point by which lenders must sign up to the scheme.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about take-up of the home owner mortgage support scheme. It is a new scheme; nothing like it has ever been tried before. It enables eligible households in short-term difficulties to defer part of their mortgage interest payments. Lenders covering more than 80 per cent. of the market have either signed up to offer the Government-backed scheme or are offering comparable arrangements. Both the Council of Mortgage Lenders and the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association have welcomed the impact that the scheme is already having on borrowers getting in contact with their lenders to discuss options.
	The hon. Gentleman talked about the low take-up of the mortgage rescue scheme. It is targeted at vulnerable householdsthose made up of the elderly or the disabled and those with childrenwho would be eligible for help under homelessness legislation if their homes were repossessed. The scheme involves households getting thorough advice on their financial circumstances, and selling part of their home, which takes time. [Hon. Members: How many?] More than 130 households have had repossession action against them halted, and more than 1,000 households struggling with their mortgage have received free advice from their local authority. We believe that 6,000 households will be helped over the next two years.
	I hate to disappoint the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries), but I can only tell her that the eco-town programme was designed to deliver a final shortlist of up to 10 potential locations. However, decisions will be made on the basis of quality, not quantity. I cannot comment on specific areas, but it is not a done deal, and no decisions have been made on the locations in which work will go forward. The other point that she made was about the right to buy, which has helped thousands of families to realise their aspiration to own their homes. The Government completely support it.

Robert Flello: I welcome my hon. Friend to his position, and congratulate him on a great start on his first day in his new role. I look forward to hearing him make many more speeches at the Dispatch Box.  [Interruption.] When I am permitted to speak

Patrick McLoughlin: claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).
	 Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
	 Question agreed to.

Question put accordingly (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.
	 The House divided: Ayes 208, Noes 298.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the proposed words be there added.
	 Question agreed to.
	 The Deputy Speaker declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to (Standing Order No. 31(2)).
	 Resolved,
	That this House notes that the Government has put in place comprehensive support to help households avoid repossession, that 220,000 households benefited from Support for Mortgage Interest last year, over 1,000 households have received free advice from their local authority each month since the launch of the Mortgage Rescue Scheme and many more are expected to benefit through the Homeowners Mortgage Support scheme and pre-action protocol; further notes that the Government has helped over 110,000 households into shared ownership and shared equity since 1997 and that demand for HomeBuy remains high; believes that the Government's zero carbon homes policy is a ground-breaking contribution to the fight against climate change; notes that planning policy makes clear the need for more family homes and that the Government is reviewing the evidence on garden development; notes that the highest rate of housing supply since 1977 was reached in 2007-08 and that the Government has brought forward many measures to help the construction industry, most recently 1 billion in the 2009 Budget, including 400 million to unblock stalled development and 100 million for council house building; further notes that regional planning is open and transparent and that regional planning bodies are required to take into account housing need; believes there is no evidence that Home Information Packs have any adverse impact on the market; and further notes that the Government is pursuing reform of council housing finance and the private rented sector and has set up the Tenant Services Authority to raise standards by putting tenants at the heart of regulation.

Business without Debate
	  
	Delegated legislation

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),

Legal Services

That the draft Probate Services (Approved Bodies) Order 2009, which was laid before this House on 6 May, be approved.  (Ms Butler.)
	 Question agreed to.

PETITIONS

Flooding (Cotswolds)

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: The petition states:
	The Petition of Moreton-in-Marsh Resilience Group, and others,
	Declares that Moreton-in-Marsh is at risk from further serious flooding; further declares that following severe flooding in July 2007 when 260 homes and premises were flooded, minimal action has been taken to repair flood relief channels and also gullies, drains and culverts remain blocked after almost two years; considers that another flood in December 2008, although not so severe, illustrated the threat of more floods into the homes of people in the town; and believes that urgent action must be taken, and quickly, to prevent the town becoming flooded again.
	The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to do all in his power to persuade Cotswold District Council, Gloucester County Council, the Environment Agency, and Thames Water to fulfil their responsibilities to the town and people of Moreton-in-Marsh and to act swiftly to avoid further flooding.
	And the Petitioners remain, etc.
	[P000379]

Bridleways (Canvey Island)

Bob Spink: Horse riders in Castle Point and on Canvey Island are deeply disappointed by the failure of councillors to help them maintain existing bridleways and get new ones for safe riding. Horse riding is a traditional activity that is supported by local residents, but seems to be punished by councillors. There are many problems. Riders suffer from obstructions put in their way by the council and from dangers on the roads. I urge councillors actively to support our local horse riders. I thank and congratulate each and every petitioner. They are good people who just want us politicians to listen to them and to enable them to ride their horses.
	The petition states:
	The Petition of Paula Holt and others,
	Declares that the horse riding community of Castle Point, and Canvey Island in particular, is desperate for safe places to ride in the borough, notes that riding at Waterside Farm, the Northwick Road fields and the sea wall between Haven Road and Northwick Road are now all closed to horse riders because of barriers put up by the council to prevent motorbike riders, but which only actually stop horse riders; further notes that we need more bridleways across the whole borough and that this activity provides exercise and much pleasure for all age groups and is traditional within the borough.
	The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to encourage Essex County Council and Castle Point Borough Council to review bridleway provision in the borough and to ensure that traditional bridleways are maintained, and new and safe bridleways are provided.
	And the Petitioners remain, etc.
	[P000380]

AUNG SAN SUU KYI

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. (Mr. Frank Roy.)

Alistair Carmichael: May I say how pleased I am to have this opportunity to conclude our business this evening with a few remarks about the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi? She is rightly known and respected throughout the world for the quiet calm and the dignity with which she faces intolerable repression. She currently faces a process that, for the purposes of this debate, we will call a trial, but which, it is widely accepted, conforms to none of the recognised principles of natural justice that we would understand in this country.
	I welcome the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), to his new position. I welcome his appointment; we are delighted to have him here. As the secretary of the all-party parliamentary group on democracy in Burma, may I say that we have always enjoyed a fruitful and close working relationship with his predecessors in the Foreign Office and with Ministers in the Department for International Development? I am confident that that relationship will continue under this Minister, whom I congratulate on his appointment. I wish him every success.
	The charge facing Aung San Suu Kyi is that of violating of the conditions of her house arrest. If she is convictedwe might reasonably say when she is convicted, because the purpose of the trial is to obtain a further convictionshe stands to have a further five-year period of imprisonment imposed on her. The irony is that this imprisonment will be for the breach of a condition of her detention, which has already been declared illegal by the United Nations as a contravention of international law and of Burmese domestic law. This illegality heaped on illegality is a particular feature of Aung San Suu Kyi's position, and of the loathsome regime by which she is being oppressed in Burma.
	Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest on and off for 13 of the past 19 years. The process first started in 1989, when the martial law provisions of the time allowed for detention without charge or trial for a period of up to three years. It is a matter of public record that in the elections in 1990, the National League for Democracy, of which she is the leader, won some 82 per cent. of the available seats. That was a remarkable achievement, and an indication of the standing that she enjoys in her own country as well as in the wider international community. It is also a matter of record that the junta refused to recognise the results of the elections, and that at that point, it changed the rules to allow for her continued detention for up to five years.
	Aung San Suu Kyi was released from detentionat that point she was under house arrestin 1995. She was placed under house arrest again, with additional conditions restricting her entitlement to travel, in 2000. I mention the restriction on travel because it is well known that as a consequence of those restrictions, she was unable to visit her dying husband in London for fear of not being allowed to return to Burma.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Is it not an indication of the nature of the Burmese authorities that in the forthcoming trial of Aung San Suu Kyi on 12 Junewhich, as the hon. Gentleman has said, could lead to her imprisonment for five yearsthree out of four of her defence witnesses have been denied access to the court? The Burmese Government are producing 14 witnesses for the prosecution, yet she is to be allowed only one. Is it not even more shocking that members of the pro-democracy 1988 movement who are in jail are being denied adequate food? They are not allowed food parcels, and those who have severe medical conditions, including heart attacks, are not allowed any medical supplies. Is that not an indication of the nature of the Burmese regime?

Alistair Carmichael: It is. It is also an indication of the exceptionally unfair, ill-conceived process in which Aung San Suu Kyi finds herself. Speaking as one who previously practised as a court solicitor, I believe that it breaches just about every norm of international law. My only quibble with the hon. Gentleman is that I was told that the number of prosecution witnesses being produced was 16, compared with one defence witness, but the numbers make no difference. What is most obnoxious is the fact that the person standing trial is not being allowed to present her case.

Bob Spink: The hon. Gentleman may be aware thatin 2003, I believeI visited the Karen ethnic groups in the Burma jungle. Does he agree that while the Government of Thailand should be thanked for their tolerance of the refugee camps just over the Thai border, they nevertheless have a major part to play in putting pressure on the Burmese junta to respect human rights?

Alistair Carmichael: Like the hon. Gentleman, I have a great deal of sympathy for the position in which the Thai Government find themselves. We occasionally hear reports of some activities within the camps that are a cause of concernfor example, the suggestion that refugees are being pushed back across the Burmese border. The point was made in discussions with the Under-Secretary of State for International Development earlier today that the refugees in Thai camps are not allowed to work, which is also a cause of concern. I have to say that it would be difficult for the UK Government to argue that point too vociferously, given that asylum seekers in this country are so rarely entitled to find paid employment.

John Bercow: The institutionalised inhumanity of the Burmese junta is reflected in the denial of Aung San Suu Kyi's right even to use the telephone, and the frequent denial of her right to medical treatment. Are not those further examples of why, in the final analysis, multilateral action is vital if we are to give effect to the UN proclamation of the responsibility to protect?

Alistair Carmichael: Yes, that is absolutely the case, and it is fair to say that no country on its own can possibly hope to effect a solution to the difficulties currently facing the Burmese people. It has to be said, however, that the one power in the region that might have particular sway and influence is China. Clearly, that country is not minded to promote democracy movementsfor reasons that largely speak for themselvesbut the opportunity for multilateral action lies in efforts made to influence China to bring a more benign influence to bear on Burma.
	Let me return to the history of Aung San Suu Kyi's detention. She was released for a period, but subsequently re-arrested in May 2003 in the aftermath of a horrific attack on pro-democracy activists and herself in northern Burma. Seventy people were killed and more than 100 arrested. Aung San herself was held for a period of some three months in what was effectively secret imprisonment; at that stage, nobody really knew where she was or what she was suffering. Her house arrest then continued until 2007, at which point it expired. It was renewed for a further year until 2008, at which point, with a still further extension having been allowed, the UN intervened to clarify, if any clarification were needed, that the detention was a contravention of both international and domestic law.
	It is interesting, although perhaps academic, to speculate on what might have happened if last month Mr. John William Yettawa US national, I am toldhad not taken it on himself to swim through the lake surrounding Aung San Suu Kyi's house to break into the compound and remain there, giving rise to the charge she currently faces, which is breach of house arrest. That incident shows the Alice through the Looking Glass world that we are in when we deal with Burma. We have here one of the very few examples of a victim of housebreaking finding herself, rather than the perpetrator, to be the victim, or subject, of criminal proceedings.
	The hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) referred to health concerns. Aung San Suu Kyi is now being held in prison, as opposed to under house arrest, and those health concerns are real, substantial and widely held. It is said that she suffers from low blood pressure and severe dehydration. I know that the British embassy in Rangoon does what it can to stay in touch and to make itself as fully aware as possible of the circumstances in which she is being held, and I hope that the Minister will be able to update us on what the Government in this country understand her present medical condition to be.
	I should also record the appreciation of many of us of the efforts of Mr. Mark Canning, the United Kingdom ambassador to Burma. He recently described Aung San Suu Kyi's trial as a show trial. He has been allowed one day's access to the courtroom.

James McGovern: I am sure the hon. Gentleman is aware that it is not only Members of Parliament here in Westminster who are gravely concerned about the welfare of Aung San Suu Kyi. Last night my local authority, Dundee city council, with cross-party support, backed a campaign to free this very brave lady. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the current trial is no more than an effort to ensure that she is incarcerated before the elections in Burma that are scheduled to take place next year?

Alistair Carmichael: I do, and I think that that view is held fairly widely. The history of Aung San Suu Kyi's detention is a remarkable, albeit perverse, tribute to her strength, and the extent to which the junta truly fears the influence that she could have if she were left at liberty. The irony is that while she may become physically more frail, politically she becomes stronger with every day that she passes in detention. We should be interested to hear from the Minister whether he has any information from Mark Canning on what he has been able to discern about the conduct of the trial from the limited access that he and other external monitors have been given.
	I once heard Aung San Suu Kyi described as
	an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.
	That encapsulates rather nicely the point that I just made to the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. McGovern). The real tragedy is that while she herself is a remarkable woman who is widely recognised for her achievements throughout the world, inasmuch as she is a political prisoner she is by no means unique in Burma. It is estimated that there are some 2,100 political prisoners there, and the figure may be even higher.
	It is clear that Aung San Suu Kyi's detention is a political detention. There is no question of any criminality. There is also no doubt that the wish to keep her in detention is clearly related to the elections due in 2010. If we imagine the position from the generals' point of view, we can well see why they would want to do that.
	It is fair to recognise the strong and effective efforts made by the United Kingdom Government in recent years. I was particularly impressed by the words of the Prime Minister in his contribution to the 64 words project. We were all invited to offer 64 words in anticipation of Aung San Suu Kyi's 64th birthday next Friday. The Prime Minister put it rather well when he wrote:
	The clamour for your release is growing across Europe, Asia, and the entire world. We must do all we can to make this birthday the last you spend without your freedom.
	President Obama perhaps understated the position when he said that Aung San Suu Kyi's detention
	cast serious doubt on the Burmese regime's willingness to be a responsible member of the international community.
	It is not often that we would accuse President Obama of understatement, but on this occasion it appears that he did not indulge in any hyperbole.

Malcolm Bruce: My hon. Friend mentioned the entire international community. While it may be no surprise that Russia is no champion of democracy and human rights, does he not agree that it is a great disappointment that a neighbour of BurmaIndia, the world's largest democracyhas not only failed to provide adequate support for the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi, but has actually given comfort to the Burmese regime?

Alistair Carmichael: Yes, I do. When speaking earlier about the role of China in the region, I was remiss in not referring to India, which could have doneand, indeed, can yet doa great deal more. I think it is fair to say that the further away a country is from the region, the more diluted its influence. India is part of the Commonwealth, as we are, and I hope that the Minister will do all he can to maximise the benefits from such links.
	When the Minister replies, I hope we will hear a bit more about what the Government are doing to build the broad international coalition that we all think is necessary. I hesitate to use the phrase when Aung San Suu Kyi is convicted when we are still in the process of the trial, as it offends my sensitivities as a lawyer, but such is the nature of this exercise that we have to be realistic and acknowledge that she will be convicted: the prospect of acquittal is so negligible as not to be worthy of consideration. What measures do we anticipate taking in that event? It seems to me that there is an obvious response: to build this broad international coalition, particularly for an international arms embargo. Everybody seems to support such an embargo, but no matter how strongly they do that, it never seems to happen. Within the European Union, will the UK press for a travel ban to be extended to the prosecutors and judges who have been responsible for this sham of a trial?
	In essence, those are our concerns. I know that the Government remain committed to bringing democracy to Burma. I hope that, whatever happens to Aung San Suu Kyi, she will not be left to suffer in vain, and that everything that happens to her will only serve to redouble our determination to bring democracy to that beautiful but benighted country.

Ivan Lewis: I congratulate the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) on securing this Adjournment debate on this incredibly important issue, and on the responsible yet passionate way in which he made his argument from a very informed perspective. I also thank him for his generous congratulations on my appointment to my new post; I regard it as a tremendous honour to be a Minister of State in the Foreign Office with responsibility for the middle east, Burma and other similar issues. I am in day two of the job, so I hope Members will be tolerant as I respond to the best of my ability. May I also assure the hon. Gentleman that I intend to work very closely with his all-party group, and indeed with all all-party groups who have an interest in my new portfolio of responsibilities?
	A number of Members are present who have consistently raised issues in relation to Burma over a long period, and I believe that the cumulative pressure from Members in all parts of the House does in the end make a difference in international opinion. There are doubts about how much that impacts on the regime, but it is important that the House continues to offer oxygen in terms of the political situation and political realities in Burma. I therefore congratulate all Members who take an interest in these issues on continuing to bring them to the Floor of the House.
	As Members are aware, in the early morning of 14 May Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested simply for not reporting an intruder. Her trial on these absurd charges began on 18 May. The hon. Gentleman gave a different analogy, but in effect a prisoner is being prosecuted apparently because the prison guards were asleep on the job. Our ambassador in RangoonI noted that the hon. Gentleman paid tribute to his leadership on these issueshas reported the following:
	It's difficult to see anything but a guilty verdict...these trials tend to be pre-scripted. All decisions of any significance in Burma are made by the ubiquitous 'higher authority'.
	He continued:
	The generals will want to make sure Suu Kyi is unable to play a role in the elections next year.
	That seems pre-scripted and pre-destined, and the point has been made by hon. Members. He continued:
	So the betting is on a sentence that extends her house arrest well into 2010 or beyond.
	I have no information on the medical condition of Aung San Suu Kyi. I shall inquire into that and write to the hon. Gentleman, and I shall try to find a way of making other hon. Members aware of the current situation, particularly in relation to her mental and physical health.
	I am proud that the UK has led, in many ways, the international response to this outrage. We have spoken to EU leaders and members of the UN Security Council. Burma's neighbours, including China, India, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries, are in no doubt that they have a critical role to play and need to use their influenceI reiterate that call in this debate. I wish to pay tribute to the tremendous work done by my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Bill Rammell), when he held this portfolio. He spoke up at the meeting of 45 Asian and EU Ministers in Hanoi only last month and he did not pull any punches. He said that the charges against Aung San Suu Kyi were baseless, he called for her to be released, along with the other 2,100 political prisoners who are detained in Burmathose are the ones we know ofand he asserted that without her and other opposition leaders the 2010 elections would simply not have any credibility in international eyes.
	In Hanoi and in Phnom Penh, my predecessor spoke directly to Burmese Ministers to urge them to take positive steps to restore democracy. As hon. Members will be aware, and as the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland mentioned, the UK is taking action within the European Union. The Prime Minister intends to raise the issue of Burma at the June European Council. On 19 May, the Foreign Secretary discussed further steps that the EU should take in Brussels, and our officials continue to work with EU member states on tighter measures that target the regime. The Government believe that further measures, including financial sanctions, will increase pressure on the regime.
	May I return to the comment that the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland made about Aung San Suu Kyi's health? We believe that she is not in bad health, but she has severely limited access to medical staff and we do not have any further information. She is, as ever, a remarkable womanwe would all accept thatand we believe that she is well enough to defend herself appropriately during the course of these proceedings, however unfair and unjust we know them to be. That is the best information we can offer at the moment, but I am certainly willing to provide any further information that I can get to him.
	May I return to the UK's contribution? We have ensured that Burma is discussed at the United Nations, including in the Security Council. The UK will be pushing for the firmest of responses, but it is only right on occasions such as this to be honest and frank about the boundaries of the effectiveness of our efforts. For example, hon. Members will be aware that our efforts to secure a Security Council resolution in 2007 following the saffron revolution were blocked, and the current composition of the Security Council means that any binding resolution against Burma is unlikely. Of course, the UK supports the imposition of a universal arms ban against Burma, but we know that an arms embargo requires a mandatory chapter 7 resolution.
	I am also aware that there are calls for Burma to be referred to the International Criminal Court. Appalling and unforgivable crimes are undoubtedly being committed in Burma as we speak, but that country is not party to the Rome statute, and again a Security Council resolution would be required. We believe that it is incredibly important that we focus on practical measures that will convince the regime to choose the path of reform and national reconciliation.
	What we have achieved so far is two unprecedented presidential statements, and we should regard that as positive. Two weeks ago, the Security Council expressed its concern about the arrest and called for political prisoners to be released and involved and engaged in the political process. As the hon. Gentleman said, we know that President Obama and the Secretary of State in the American Administration share our concern for Burma, and recently US sanctions against the regime were renewed.
	Although it is right that there be a focus on Aung San Suu Kyi, the hon. Gentleman rightly made the point that she is one of more than 2,100 political prisoners in Burma. People have been imprisoned for up to 65 years simply for asking for help for cyclone victimsan appalling state of affairs.
	Another crucial requirement for national reconciliation has to be the involvement of all ethnic groups in Burma. The UK has condemned the continuing human rights abuses that ethnic groups in Burma have suffered. Recently, we received worrying reports about the situation in Karen state, which the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) referred to. Thousands of people have been forced to flee to Thailand because of an offensive by the Burmese army, and tragically there have been a number of civilian casualties. Violence in Karen state can only prolong the suffering of the Karen people.
	The Rohingya people are abused in Burma, and abused as refugees throughout the region. We have drawn the attention of the international community, including the United Nations Human Rights Council, to the plight of minorities. The conflicts with the Karen community and others are regrettable consequences of the regime's attitude to the people of Burma. The full and equitable participation of Burma's ethnic groups in the political process has to be the key to a durable, sustainable solution to its problems.
	I refer to my previous responsibilities in saying that the way in which we respond to the humanitarian crisis is equally important. We are the biggest donor of humanitarian aid to Burma. On top of our contribution to cyclone relief of 45 million, we intend to spend another 25 million on aid to the people of Burma this year.
	There is a worldwide public campaign calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. The Prime Minister and global leaders have added their weight to that of millions who have spoken out about the plight of Burma.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Will the Minister undertake on behalf of the British Government to make renewed representations to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, that one of his utmost priorities should be to talk to the Burmese regime, and indeed the Chinese regime, to see how this tyranny can be ended? What we have heard in the House this evening is totally unacceptable according to all international norms of human behaviour.

Ivan Lewis: I agree with the hon. Gentleman. I hope to meet the Secretary-General next week, although that is not confirmed, and of course this will be one of the major issues that I raise. We believe that it is very important that he use his good offices and reputation to intervene in a way that will change the dynamic of the country. His office and his role are absolutely crucial to securing progress, so if I am able to meet him next week, I intend to raise this specific matter.
	We are in an interesting time in our domestic political scene, and at a time like this one might think that the Prime Minister would have other things on his mind. However, hon. Members should know the level of his focus on and concern about this issue. He feels personally engaged in what has happened to Aung San Suu Kyi. He regards her as a fellow leader in the international community
	 House adjourned without Question put (Standing Order No. 9(7)).